Arts by Sandra
A website for an artist who teaches, sells work and rents her studio — three different conversations, funnelled into one form she can actually answer.
The problem
Sandra teaches drawing and printmaking, sells her own work, and rents out her studio. Three different businesses, and the same sentence about all of them: "people ask me the same three questions, and I answer them one at a time."
The questions arrived by phone, by Instagram message and by word of mouth, in whichever of three languages the person happened to speak — this is Brussels, so French, Dutch and English are not a nice-to-have. What she wanted was not a website in the abstract. She wanted the schedule and the price of a Tuesday class to be readable without her typing them again, and she wanted to stop losing enquiries in a DM folder.
What I chose
Laravel, with server-rendered Blade templates, Tailwind, and Alpine for the small
amount of interactivity a brochure site honestly needs. Locale is a route prefix
and the slugs are translated with it — /fr/cours-de-dessin, /en/drawing-classes,
/nl/tekenlessen — with hreflang alternates on every page, because a French
reader landing on an English URL is a bounce.
The centre of the site is one contact form with an enquiry type on it: general, classes, studio rental, artwork. Every page funnels into it. A class card, a studio rate and an artwork all end in the same place, with the subject already decided, so Sandra opens one inbox and knows what she is reading before she reads it.
What I rejected
Squarespace and Wix. They would have produced a perfectly good brochure site faster than I did, and I would recommend one to a lot of people. Two things ruled them out here. Sandra has to be able to change her own prices and add her own work, and when that content is hers it should live in her database rather than rented inside someone else's editor. And three locales with translated slugs is exactly where the hosted builders get either expensive or bad — the multilingual story is usually a paid tier and a URL scheme you do not choose.
A static site generator. Content in git is a lovely arrangement for me and a useless one for her. Every price change becomes a commit and a deploy, which is to say every price change becomes an email to me. That is not a site she owns; it is a subscription to my attention.
A new stack for its own sake. Laravel is what I am fastest in. Picking something more fashionable would have cost weeks and bought her nothing she could see on the screen. The interesting decisions on this project were never framework decisions.
A shop and a booking calendar. Both were on the table and both are cut. A cart means payments, VAT on art sales, and shipping a hundred-by-eighty canvas — real work, in exchange for automating a sale that is currently a conversation and is better for being one. A booking calendar means committing a studio slot before anyone has spoken. So artworks carry medium, dimensions, price and a contact me about this piece link; the studio page names the day and half-day rates and sends you to the same form. If either turns out to be the bottleneck, the funnel already tells us which one.
What it cost
The site is deployed and most of it still says content to complete. The classes, the artworks and the studio rates on it are seeded demonstration data. That sequence was the plan — build the shape, let her fill it — and it is still the right call, because the alternative is a designer waiting on copy and a client being asked to imagine a page. But it means the honest state of this project is a finished structure wearing placeholder text, and it has worn it longer than I would like. Nothing is blocked in the code. Photographing forty pieces and writing three languages of copy is her work, and it is the slowest part of the job.
The second cost is the same one in a different shape. Three locales, one author. French is hers; English and Dutch have to be written or translated and then read by someone who actually speaks them, because machine-translation artefacts read as carelessness — on a page whose entire job is to make a careful person look careful.
The tradeoff that still nags is the enquiry model. Every message is one row with a type column on it, which is right for the volume she has and wrong the day she asks which artworks people ask about most. That answer wants the enquiry attached to the thing it was about. It is a small migration, deliberately deferred, and I would rather write it when there is a real question behind it than guess at the shape now.
The outcome
Live at artsbysandra.be: six pages across three locales, eighteen routes, server rendered, no client-side framework, and a single form standing in for the shop and the booking engine that were never built. No traffic or enquiry numbers yet — and quoting any before the real content lands would be measuring the placeholder.