Creative Crochet

THE WEBSITE THAT REFUSED TO SELL YOU ANYTHING

A little build, a big lesson, and one very patient mother

Okay. Here's the thing.

When somebody tells you they want a website, nine times out of ten what they actually mean is "I want a store." Carts. Checkouts. Little badges that scream BUY NOW. The whole internet has kind of trained us to believe that a website is a vending machine with better lighting.

So when my mother came to me — and let me be clear, this was a real, sit-down, mom-with-a-vision conversation — and said she wanted a site for her crochet work, my first instinct was to reach for the shopping cart. And she stopped me cold.

"I don't want to sell online," she said. "I don't want to chase people through Facebook Marketplace. I just want to promote my crafts."

And honestly? That's the most refreshing brief I've gotten in years.

SO WHAT DID SHE ACTUALLY WANT?

Two things, really.

One: a beautiful place to show off what she makes. Crochet is tactile, it's colourful, it's the kind of thing your eyes want to wander around in. So the work had to be the star — not buttons, not pop-ups, not "customers also bought."

Two: the markets. She's a maker who shows up in person, at actual tables, in actual towns, talking to actual humans. The website's job wasn't to replace that. It was to send people toward it. Where she'll be, and when, and how to come say hi.

No transactions. No inventory headaches. No 2 a.m. "where is my order" emails. Just a window into the work and a map to the maker. There's something almost rebellious about that in 2026, and I love it.

THE PART WHERE I GEEK OUT (BRIEFLY, I PROMISE)

For the folks reading this who care about what's under the hood — and I see you — here's the shape of it.

The site's built on Next.js with React, which is a fancy way of saying it's fast, it's modern, and it loads like it respects your time. The pages are pre-rendered, so when someone clicks through, they're not waiting around watching a spinner do its little dance.

The content all lives in Contentful, a headless CMS. Translation: the design and the writing are kept separate, like a good roommate arrangement. That matters for a reason I'll get to in a second.

The gallery uses a masonry layout — that nice, Pinterest-y, everything-fits-just-right grid — so a tall scarf and a chunky little plushie can live side by side without anybody getting awkwardly cropped. The markets and events run through their own structured listings, each with its own page, so "where's she going to be in July" is always one click away. There's a contact form wired up through Resend so messages land cleanly in an inbox, no sketchy third-party clutter. And the whole thing's got proper SEO baked in — structured data, the works — so when someone in town searches for handmade crochet, she actually turns up.

No store. But make no mistake, this thing is engineered.

NOW, THE BIT THAT MATTERS MOST

Here's what I think separates a project from a deliverable.

I didn't build this, hand over a password, and vanish into the night. The site is set up so my mother — who is many wonderful things, but is not a software developer — can actually run it herself. New photos, new market dates, a fresh blurb about a piece she's proud of. That's the whole point of keeping the content separate from the code. She's not filing a support ticket to change a date. She's just... doing it.

And the support's ongoing. We do training. We sit down, we walk through it, and slowly the thing becomes hers, not mine. Because a website you can't update is a brochure with a hosting bill. A website you CAN update is a living thing.

That's the difference between handing someone a fish and, you know — building them a really nice, low-maintenance fish-management system with a friendly interface.

THE TAKEAWAY

If you're a prospective client reading this, or maybe somebody sizing me up for a role, here's what I'd want you to pull from it:

I listen to the actual brief — even when the obvious build is the wrong one. I'll talk you out of the shopping cart you don't need. I build with modern, sensible tools, and I build for the human who has to use it after I'm gone. And I stick around to make sure it works.

Also — and I won't belabour this — I had a genuinely good time making it. The best projects usually leave fingerprints like that.

My mother gets to make her beautiful things and meet her people at the markets. The website just quietly does its job in the background, pointing the way.

No checkout required.

That's the project.
Now go find a local maker's table and buy something with your actual hands.