Opal Aero Consulting

Personal Projects

2 Week Project in Sept 2022

Intro

Background

Opal Aero is an aircraft maintenance consulting agency based out of New South Wales, Australia. They specialize in commercial aircraft maintenance and cost management solutions. The company's head of marketing reached out to me to see if we could set up an online precense for the brand, which included creating a responsive static website, company email, and LinkedIn page, with the goal of implementing these quickly and with the cheapest operating costs possible.

My approach

I first worked with the client to understand their objectives. With the contracts signed and payment information figured out, my first step was to secure a domain name for the site. We had agreed on opalaeroconsulting.com. Next, I needed a basic website template to get me up and running. Starting from scratch would take too long, since I already had to create several pages of content along with the rest of the project's objectives. I first selected a template from HTML5UP.com which would give me the basic layout I was going for. I then created a new repo, cloned it on my computer, and went to work customizing the site for the client. We collaborated on the content, images, and the rest of the site's content.

Solutions

The client wanted the lowest operating costs possible, so we settled for a static site hosted for github pages. The hosting is free and it has inbuilt version control with an easy ability for others to edit the site, so I felt it was the best solution. One issue I came across was the need for server side content to host the site's contact form. I needed some way to redirect inputs to an email without using PHP or other server side solutions. I went with a quick and cheap solution: formspree, with the free plan which could easily handle the traffic at the compnay's current level. Next, I set up the google workspace account, a contact@opalaeroconsulting.com email to redirect traffic, and I set up emails for all of the company employees. I made sure to document all of this information along the way to make sure all of the login info could cleanly be passed along to the company's leadership. Lastly, I built out company LinkedIn page to reinforce the brand and tie together the contact links on the website.

What I learned

This project taught me a lot about working with tight deadlines and piggybacking on other solutions to build something fast and for cheap. The total hosting costs for the whole project was less than 20 dollars per month altogether, which isn't too bad for google workspace and its company email server, a responsive company website, and the domain name needed to direct traffic to it. Overall, this project was cool and I learned a lot about intergrating all these different tools together to quickly build something usable and that looks nice.