← All work
Case study Web design Hebrew RTL · English LTR

48 hours,
no developer

A production website for a luxury real-estate agent in Herzliya Marina – two languages, custom domain, live email, search-indexable in both. Designed, built and shipped by one person in two days, with no developer and no agency involved.

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Six views of matancarmeli.com arranged as a collage
48hfrom idea to live
production site
2languages,
one URL each
0developers, agencies
or contractors
1designer,
end to end
The brief

There wasn’t one. It was my idea.

Matan Carmeli sells luxury property around Herzliya Marina and had no digital presence of his own – his listings lived entirely on other people’s platforms. Nobody commissioned this site. I saw that he needed a home that actually belonged to him, and I built it.

Why that matters more than the timeline: the real constraint here wasn’t the clock. It was that the entire delivery chain – branding, front-end code, domain setup, DNS, SSL certificates, SEO, and live inquiry handling – had to be carried by one designer, because there was nobody else on the project.
What shipped

Not a landing page. A production site.

This is the part that makes “two days” mean something. Every item below was live and verified at the end of it.

Front end
Static HTML, CSS and JavaScript. No framework, no build step.
Languages
Hebrew RTL and English LTR, one dedicated URL each, with reciprocal hreflang.
Domain
Custom domain registered and connected: apex A record, www CNAME, valid TLS on both.
Redirects
www → apex, 308, closing the duplicate-content gap between the two hosts.
Email
Forwarding at DNS level with SPF – and tested end to end with a real message, not just configured.
Search
robots.txt and sitemap.xml, sitemap carrying both language targets.
Contact
WhatsApp deep link with a prefilled message – no backend, no form server, no data stored.
Identity
Logo applied across both languages, carrying the dark hero and the white scrolled header from one file.
The identity

The brand was mine before the site was

The logo is earlier work for the same client, reused here as the site’s natural foundation. Everything downstream of it – the palette, the typography, and the layout hierarchy – was defined specifically for this build.

matancarmeli.com brand

Colour

One navy, one lift of it, and a greyscale that does the rest. A property site should not compete with the photography – the pictures carry the colour, so the interface holds still.

Brand

Navy#12142C Navy, lifted#2D328A

Text

Body#565968 Body alt#63665F Muted#6B6E7D Faint#9A9D9E

Rules

Border#ECECEC Border strong#D8D8DC

Typography

Heebo, and only Heebo – one family carrying both scripts. A bilingual site that pairs two typefaces has to keep them in step at every weight and size forever; one family that draws Hebrew and Latin as siblings removes that problem instead of managing it.

Hebrew · RTL

מתן כרמלי – נדל”ן יוקרה במרינה הרצליה

Latin · LTR

Matan Carmeli – luxury property, Herzliya Marina

From finding to fix

Four decisions the tools did not make

The site was built with generative AI assistance. These are the points where the default output was wrong, and the work was knowing why.

01
Language architecture

URLs over browser sniffing

The default

The tool defaulted to client-side browser detection – the standard automated shortcut. But Matan’s local buyers search in Hebrew, while Googlebot crawls with a US-English locale.

The decision

Gave each language its own dedicated URL path and made the URL the only source of truth. Under browser detection, the Hebrew site would never have been indexed at all. The language switch is a crawlable <a href>, not a JavaScript button, so search engines can actually follow it.

02
Engineering discipline

Static markup over runtime bloat

The default

The generated export relied on React with an in-browser compiler – convenient for a quick demo, but completely unfit for production.

The decision

Rebuilt the entire codebase in clean, semantic HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript. A brochure site for a boutique real-estate agent doesn’t need a runtime framework; it needs fast load times, no build steps, and zero technical debt.

03
Conversion UX

A prefilled inquiry over an empty chat

The default

A generic WhatsApp icon sat in the social row alongside Facebook and Instagram, dumping visitors into a blank personal chat with no context.

The decision

Removed it. An empty chat window asks the visitor to do all the work. Instead, the contact flow routes through a dedicated WhatsApp deep-link carrying pre-filled, localized copy that visitors can review and send with one tap. Zero backend overhead, zero stored data.

04
Luxury etiquette

Respecting the buyer’s calendar

The default

The standard real-estate contact form: a name and a number, operating on the lazy assumption that the agent can simply call whenever they are free.

The decision

Designed a preferred callback window into the inquiry flow from the very first mockup. I know Matan’s clientele – their time is their most valuable asset, and an unexpected sales call in the middle of a meeting is jarring friction. Giving them control over when the conversation happens isn’t just a convenient form field; it’s an act of hospitality that respects their schedule before saying a word. The selected time is packaged directly into the prefilled WhatsApp message, setting an attentive, high-touch tone from the very first interaction.

The workflow

What the tools did, and what I did

The AI built the scaffolding fast; I sculpted the result.

The tool doesn’t have an eye. It doesn’t understand quiet luxury, editorial restraint, or why a specific margin makes a photograph feel expensive. I came in with a clear visual target and steered the tools step-by-step, refining the typography, tightening the layout, and overriding automated choices until the site landed on the exact look and feel I wanted.

Speed came from the software. The precision, the visual discipline, and the soul of the interface came from twenty years of designing things properly.

The division of labor

  • Mine: The concept, the site structure, the visual language, the logo, steering the tools step-by-step to the exact aesthetic finish, and every technical decision listed above.
  • Generated: The execution – markup, styles, and configuration files, written and regenerated to my exact specifications.
  • Matan’s: The photography. Shot on location and provided for the build.
  • Nobody’s: There was no developer, no agency, and no third-party contractor on this project at any stage.

The honest version of the speed claim

AI compressed the production, not the judgment.

Two days was possible because twenty years of practice decided what to ask for, how to shape it, and what to throw away.

The same tools, in hands without that foundation, produce a site that looks finished on the surface – and cannot even be indexed.

Built with Claude Design and Claude Code.

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