Sites for friends and family

What it does

beejones.co.uk is a management-coaching site built around a long-running newsletter archive—dozens of posts, each a Markdown file—plus a dedicated chief-of-staff services page and a contact form. imogenclaire.co.uk is an artist’s portfolio: a gallery of artwork (medium, dimensions, year and price recorded per piece) with a full-screen lightbox for viewing individual pieces, and its own enquiry form. Neither site owner needs to write code or use a CMS login to update their site—new content is a new Markdown file.

How it works

Both sites are built the same way: Astro content collections define a schema for their content type (a newsletter post’s frontmatter on one site, an artwork’s title/medium/dimensions/price/availability on the other), and Astro generates static pages from whatever Markdown files exist in that collection at build time. Adding a new newsletter post or a new piece of artwork is a new file and a deploy, not a database migration.

Stack and why

Astro was chosen for both because neither site needs client-side interactivity beyond a lightbox and a form—a static site generator keeps them fast and cheap to host, with content collections doing the job a small CMS would otherwise be needed for.

What I would do differently

The biggest issue with each site is maintainability. It is trivial for me to issue updates: an edit to a Markdown file follwed by a git commit/push. However, Bee and Imogen are not technical enough even for that, with very clear instructions. Both sites should’ve been built with a CMS from the ground-up, to cater for their technical competence.