Coach Lissa Needs a Site

A Friend With a Problem

Shortly after wrapping up Protonic Wave Reversal, my friend Melissa Hruska, who coaches under the name Coach Lissa, asked if I could help build her a website. She was just starting out as a HYROX coach and personal trainer with a specialty in women’s health. Her needs were pretty simple, which made it a good opportunity to finally learn Astro as a web framework and figure out whether something like TinaCMS could make content updates easy for someone who isn’t a developer.

We sat down to map out the site structure and it came together quickly. A few pages, a contact form, somewhere to post updates. Nothing complicated.

The Stack

Astro turned out to be a genuinely pleasant framework to learn. The file structure, layout system, and component model clicked fast, and pairing it with Tailwind CSS and Motion made for a site that felt polished and loaded fast. Astro’s approach to shipping minimal JavaScript by default is a nice fit for a site like this where performance and simplicity matter more than interactivity.

Hooking up a contact form through Resend was straightforward. I also added a Cloudflare D1 database as a backup for form submissions, so if Resend ever changes their free plan or goes away entirely, nothing gets lost quietly.

TinaCMS slotted in well as a content layer. The editing experience is friendly enough that Melissa can update her own content without touching any code, which was the whole point.

The project was a good reminder that sometimes the best way to learn a new tool is to just build something real with it, especially when the scope is small enough that a wrong turn doesn’t cost much. Astro earned a permanent spot in how I think about building web projects going forward.