Costa Wave Web

The challenge

I build websites for other people, but my own site had to be properly good too. Two audiences: expats and business owners on the Costa Blanca, and Dutch companies operating in or around Spain. They search in different languages and on different words.

So the site had to work in two languages, each with its own web addresses and its own visibility in Google. All of it manageable from one place. And I wanted to keep it up to date myself once it was live: add a blog post, change a service page, redirect an old address after a rename. Without touching code for any of it.

It is an ongoing project alongside my freelance work. I keep improving it and use it as a testing ground for techniques I later put to work for clients.

What I did

The site runs on Astro, with Sanity for content. Sanity holds a set of ready-made building blocks: a header section, a services block, an FAQ, a form. I make a new page by stacking blocks and filling them in. Changing text and images happens in that same place, without a line of code.

Dutch and English sit side by side as two full versions, each with its own web addresses (/nl/over, /en/about). To Google they are two real sites.

Every page lays out its own findability signals the moment I publish: which language version matches which, and how the page looks when someone shares it on LinkedIn or WhatsApp. In technical terms: canonical, hreflang and Open Graph, generated per page. The company details sit in the source as structured data, so Google knows who is behind it.

Astro produces plain HTML. Visitors download very little and the page is simply there. A site like that also runs with any hosting provider, including the cheapest packages.

For clients I pick the technology to fit what they need. Next.js when a project needs a lot of custom work and interaction, like CarmenUlloa Real Estate with 5 languages and a link to their CRM.

WordPress when that suits the client better. Plenty of people have worked in it before, and that familiarity helps the moment you want to change something yourself. Good for anyone who does not feel instantly at home in a new piece of software.

I build with Gutenberg, the block editor WordPress is building its future on. You choose between a ready-made theme of mine and a custom theme written around your own brand. I write both myself, in code. From there you grow the site yourself.