Horizon Academy

Context

A small English language school in Güzelbahçe, just outside İzmir, needed to look as serious online as it is in the classroom, in two languages, with no developer on staff to maintain whatever I left behind.

What I built

A five-page bilingual site with roughly 195 translation keys behind a single English and Turkish toggle, from programmes through to enquiry. I started on a hosted AI builder that produced a React app quickly, then rebuilt the whole thing as one hand-written HTML file when it became clear a school should not inherit a Node build chain to fix a typo. The static version shipped. Enquiries go to Formspree so there is no backend to babysit, I issued and installed the certificates myself, and two further subdomains carry a placement assessment and a maths tool.

• Data store
• External service

The piece I am fondest of is the smallest: a printed QR code on the café tables downstairs pointing at a dark, phone-shaped link hub. I also designed a bilingual Word of the Day card, English meaning and word family on the left, Turkish on the right, illustrated pupil examples underneath, and produced eight in one evening to see whether the format held.

Outcome

The site, link hub and QR cards shipped in March 2026, with fourteen bilingual social creatives alongside. The card format worked. I never built the pipeline to publish the cards daily, so eight cards is where that stopped.

What I’d do differently

Ask who maintains it on day one and skip the React build entirely. Use automated certificate renewal, because ninety-day certificates renewed by hand lapse, and these did. And build the boring publishing path first with one hard-coded card, then scale content generation into it, rather than generating eight cards and creating an empty folder called Posted.