A multilingual website and custom CMS for Skalbēri

The owners finished building Skalbēri this year and came to me for a website to go with it. There was nothing online yet, so this was a build from scratch rather than a redo of something older.

They wanted a site that showed the house well in more than one language, loaded fast, and was something they could keep up to date themselves, without coming back to a developer every time a price or a photo changed.

I designed and built the site around the house itself: the rooms, the surroundings near Cēsis, and what a stay there is like. It runs in three languages, so guests from Latvia and from further out all read it in their own language.

Behind it is a custom CMS built only for what they manage: the images, the text, the prices and the booking calendar. When they upload a photo the panel compresses and adjusts it automatically for the web, so the site stays fast no matter what they add, and none of it needs a developer.

The site is built on Laravel with Tailwind for the styling, and the CMS runs on the same Laravel core. Keeping it custom instead of reaching for an off-the-shelf system means the admin carries only the parts they actually use, with nothing extra to wade through.

Speed was a priority from the start. On Google PageSpeed Insights it scores 100 for accessibility, best practices and SEO, with performance sitting right up near 100 as well, and the SEO is set up properly so the house is easy to find.

Skalbēri now has a proper home online, in three languages, that loads fast and reads well on a phone.

The owners update it themselves whenever something changes, the photos, the text, the prices or the calendar, without needing to come back to me.