A bilingual directory of licensed Šibenik guides that connects a visitor straight to the guide — live since July 2026, with the guides editing their own content.
The Challenge
Šibenik Guides brings together licensed tourist guides who have shown people around Šibenik for years — many for 15, some for 20-odd years, holding licences for the Šibenik-Knin county and its neighbours. The site isn't run by an agency but by the guides themselves, and the goal was simple: a visitor picks a guide and calls or WhatsApps that guide directly — no middleman, no commission, no booking system wedged between the two of them.
I'm one of the listed guides myself, licensed since 2011, so this was a project I built for a group I belong to — not just as the developer, but as someone who'll use the site himself.
The Solution
I built the site on my own San Andreas CMS — a Git-backed headless system where all content lives as JSON in a repository, and the CMS auto-generates the edit forms from a _meta schema block, with a media library for images. Alongside it sits a custom static-site generator (Node + Eta templates + Tailwind CSS 4) that renders the whole site into plain HTML/CSS/JS, rebuilt on the server on every deploy.
GSAP animations and a Three.js 3D hero run as progressive enhancement — both skip under prefers-reduced-motion, and when WebGL isn't available the hero falls back to a static image, so content stays readable with no JavaScript at all. Fonts (Plus Jakarta Sans) and GSAP/Three.js are self-hosted, with no CDN dependency and nothing beyond essential cookies.
What I Built
- A filterable guides list — a multi-select language filter and a county-licence filter, combined with AND logic
- Each guide's profile — call and WhatsApp buttons, languages, licences, and a bio
- The homepage — a 3D hero, a marquee of Šibenik's sights, and an intro
- A news section — posts the guides publish themselves through the CMS
- A price list and about page — alongside a cookie policy and terms
- Bilingual SEO — canonical and hreflang hr/en/x-default, per-page meta in both languages, and translated URLs (/turisticki-vodici/ vs /en/tourist-guides/)
The Results
- Live since July 2026 — and still maintained, with a county-licence filter and a footer credit added in September 2026
- The guides edit their own content — profiles and news, through the CMS, with no code involved
- A static site — fast, cheap to host, with no database or admin interface exposed on the public server
- Direct contact instead of an agency — a visitor picks a guide and calls or messages them, with no booking flow standing between them
