One Website System, Two Expressions
Two sites on the same foundation, twenty-four shared files. A common starting point, and what that means in practice.
Services Used
The situation
Two sites with similar needs: a consultancy focused on sales and visibility in Hennigsdorf, and the website of a software company that I also built. Both needed the same foundation: bilingual routing, layout and navigation, data access, sign-in, a typed connection between server and interface, and discoverability. Building each from scratch would have meant doing the same beginning twice.
The solution
Twenty-four files are shared between the two projects, and they are exactly the foundation: the locale-aware routing, the layout with header, footer and navigation, the data access, the sign-in, the typed interface layer, the middleware and the sitemap. On top of that sits whatever makes each project its own.
The limitation matters: this is a shared starting point, not a shared library. Both sites hold their own copies of those files, and they have drifted apart since the start. A correction therefore does not take effect in both places automatically; it has to be carried across.
The difference is in scope. The consultancy site has ten pages and eighty components: appointment booking, newsletter sign-up with documented consent, a dedicated form path for sales enquiries with confirmation and notification mail, a map that only loads once the visitor agrees, plus key figures and reviews. The second expression is deliberately slim: three pages, twenty-six components, no form path.
The result
Two sites that read as their own, the second built in a fraction of the time a separate design would have cost. What I learned is stated above: a copied starting point saves the beginning, not the upkeep. Keeping both aligned for the long run needs a shared package, not two copies.