Website Kiosk Hoegaarden

Software Show and Tell

Website Kiosk Hoegaarden

In 2023, a friend was about to open her own physiotherapy practice. Naturally, she needed a website to present her practice, highlight her training and areas of expertise, show the practice’s location, and provide a link to the scheduling software she had already purchased. She had also partnered with a design studio to create her logo.

I decided to keep things as simple as possible. A bit of raw HTML and CSS, combined with AWS S3 static website hosting, would do the trick. Until, it didn't. AWS S3 static web hosting doesn't support SSL/TLS on its own, which meant the site wouldn't serve https:// -- something that would hurt SEO, trigger browser warnings for visitors, and look very unprofessional alltogether.

To work around this, I spun up a small AWS EC2 instance, and installed an Apache server on it, hosting the HTML and CSS there instead.

To make my life easier, I used the Bootstrap CSS library for quick styling -- the navigation bar, grid layout, photo carousel, and so on, all came from Bootstrap. Just by sprinkling a couple of convenience classes within the HTML, you get a professional look and feel within minutes.

Domain routing was handled through AWS Route 53.

Automated deployment of code changes was set up through GitHub Actions, which pushes the code to the EC2 instance using SSH.

A fun and easy project overall!