A close friend recently started a business, making delicious wood fired pizza. A few months before hand he asked my help with getting a site up and running. I gladly took on this project and had an initial dev site up for him to check out that very same week.
The need was for something fairly modern, easy to use, and would work on both desktop and mobile. We have gone back and forth making design tweaks and improvements ever since and there is certainly still plenty of work to be done.
The site went live in production a week or so before their soft open and has been getting hundreds of hits every day since. It is incredibly light weight and runs on a budget server hosted with digital ocean. As with a number of my projects it runs inside a docker container, and sits along side some other management tools. Those help me deploy new versions with functionally zero down time, and automatically handle routing and creation of ssl certificates.
This was an interesting challenge for me. I have a ton of experience building tools and apps that work and work well. But I've never been known for creating slick or visually appealing designs myself. Implementing someone else's vision from mockups or design plans is a totally different challenge than creating a vision for how something should look and feel.
If you're ever down in Northford CT, stop in for a pie. 🍕