I'm sure if you're technologically literate you've heard of, or maybe even first-handedly experienced the "I have an app idea" friend. This friend and I have tried to start a few projects and most fizzle out quite quickly. He doesn't know exactly what I do (I'm a Full-Stack Software Engineer) but he knows I know my around a computer.
One day he told me his boss's wife has a side business and she's looking for a website. He gave me her phone number.
From the First Interaction to the First Line of Code
Hi, I got your number from Tom and I'm looking for help with my website and to list it onto the internet. I don't need anything fancy really, just a home page with my contact details and a few examples of my work. I'm interested in talking to you about how much something like this will cost and to find out more about how you work and how to proceed. Please give me a call when you free to discuss this. Regards.
This was at 4pm; I was in a work call. I replied after 10 minutes:
Hi, I had some initial questions please: • Would you want to be able to sell your art through this website? • Would you want a form for people to be able to send you messages/emails? • Do you want to be able to manage your own artwork and what's shown on the website? These questions would help me get a better idea of what you're looking for. I should be free most of tomorrow so happy to call anytime :)
From the answers to the above questions I was able to gauge the complexity. The first question told me if I need a payment provider integration. The second question whether she needed a contact form. The third whether I need a CRM/API layer.
Luckily for me, she only needed a static website with client side rendering. I put on my designer hat and got to work. I searched on dribbble, Pinterest and browsed my bookmarks on x.com to see what I could find for inspiration. I sent a few interesting pieces over to her and gathered her thoughts.
She cherrypicked things she liked from several and I got to work, I wrote my first line of code. The next part was the most difficult for me. Asking for photos and content. The website needed customisation and content. This was the make or break part because it required work from her. Again, luckily for me, she had a huge number of photos and I did the manual work of organising and picking some of the best ones. I got an MVP together and deployed it using Vercel. Asked her for feedback and slowly iterated on the website using this process.
Conclusion
The whole process took around a month; it was asynchronous for the most part. It was a surprisingly pleasant and straightforward journey. I definitely wouldn't be opposed to picking up another project like this in the future.
Feel free to check out the website I created at celestialstainedglass.co.uk