MakkahMadinahGuide.com: production build

A freelance, ground-up build for a US-based client: a free, community-contributed guide of practical, on-the-ground information for pilgrims visiting Makkah and Madinah, deliberately quiet, fast, text-first, and black-and-white rather than a typical modern web app. Visitors browse posts through a two-level taxonomy, city, then Main Title, then Sub-Title, or contribute their own submission, and everything goes through human moderation before it's public.

A full-stack Next.js 16 app, App Router, React 19, strict TypeScript, server-rendered with ISR, a rendering choice driven by the site's own heavily read-skewed traffic, content reads vastly outnumbering the occasional submission or contact-form write, which made a fast, mostly-static site the right call over a chattier single-page app. A 15-table Postgres schema on Supabase, reached via Drizzle ORM, protected by Row-Level Security as defense-in-depth: even if a public key leaked, only already-approved, public content would be readable, and every write routes through a server-side key instead.

The admin panel is built plain and forgiving on purpose, since the person running it day to day isn't technical: a TipTap rich-text editor for post bodies, a driver.js guided tour for onboarding, sharp handling image processing server-side, moderation queue, taxonomy management, ad management, editable pages, all in the same codebase, guarded by GitHub Actions quality gates, including a Lighthouse performance and accessibility budget, before anything reaches Vercel.