A discovery and delivery pack for a marine aquarium retailer
Everything needed to take a non-technical business owner from first conversation to a launched site: discovery, requirements, design direction, technology plan and cost estimate.
- Role
- Consultant and solution designer
- Industry
- Retail
How it fits together
Discovery with the owner
Business-first interviews and a questionnaire
Requirements in Notion
One database, IDs carried into commits
Design direction
Proposed, then approved by the client
Build in approved chunks
Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS
Preview and launch
GitHub and Vercel
Orange marks the parts I built.
The brief
A marine aquarium retailer wanted a premium website: a landing page first, with online selling as a possible second phase. The owner is not technical, so the plan had to be something they could read, question and approve.
What I produced
- Client discovery playbook
- Business-first interviews and workshops for a non-technical owner, with a discovery questionnaire.
- Requirements structure
- One requirements and delivery database in Notion, with IDs carried into commits and pull requests.
- Lifecycle with decision gates
- Discover, define the first release, design, build, then measure and improve. Each stage ends with something the client approves.
- Design direction
- A proposed visual direction and homepage structure, marked as proposals until the client confirms them.
- Technology and software plan
- A written recommendation with the reasoning, in plain language.
- Cost estimate
- A client-facing estimate, and an internal version with the working behind it.
- Handoff protocol
- How decisions move from planning to build without being lost between tools.
Technology decisions
- Phase 1, landing page
- Next.js with TypeScript and Tailwind CSS, source in GitHub, hosted on Vercel. No database or custom backend until a real launch requirement needs one.
- Phase 2, selling online
- No backend chosen until the client confirms products, stock, payments and shipping. Four options compared: hosted commerce, headless commerce, a custom application, or a hybrid.
- Honest controls
- No enquiry form until its delivery is configured and tested. No fake stock, fake checkout or invented claims about livestock or delivery.
- Quality bar
- Responsive and accessible pages, real metadata, optimised images, and lint, type and build checks.
Technology
Recommended for phase 1
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS
- GitHub
- Vercel
Planning and delivery
- Notion
- Claude Chat
- Claude Cowork
- Claude Code
Skills used
- Client discovery
- Requirements
- Estimation
- Project setup
- Technology selection
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