Personal Trainer Website

Background

I built a digital business card for Victor Five, a personal trainer. The goal was to give him a more professional online presence beyond social media, since having only an Instagram account was not enough to stand out. He needed a single, clean page he could point prospective clients to, with the essentials and a way to get in touch.

This was the first project I built for a professional, which shaped several of the decisions below.

Highlights

Understanding the requirement

I tried to apply lessons from The Mom Test and Start With Why, aiming to understand what Victor was currently doing and struggling with rather than just asking what he wanted.

The most useful thing to come out of those conversations was that he described what he wanted as something like a “business card”, and as soon as I heard that I knew exactly what was needed. Just having a website seemed to be the point, rather than the actual content of the site itself.

Observability and Analytics

This was a site that could affect Victor’s professional image, so I needed to be sure it was being monitored at all times.

• Sentry set up for error tracking. It sends a weekly email summary of user activity and any issues.
• Vercel Speed Insights and Analytics configured, showing visitor counts and the countries they come from.

Leaning on pre-built software and services

Pre-built software and managed services sped the whole development process up enormously.

• Mantine (a React component library) made building the UI remarkably quick.
• Vercel gave me CI/CD and analytics out of the box.
• Resend handled the emails, removing the need for a backend altogether.
• I had been dreading the observability setup, but Vercel and the Sentry plugin handled most of that too.

Once I actually sat down to do it, the build only took a couple of days, which was quick given I was still using autocomplete rather than AI agents.

Reflections and Learnings

Match the technology to the requirement

In retrospect, even though I am happy with my technology choices, I think I over-deliberated before building. The brief was a “business card”, which should have been a clue that it did not need a scalable solution.