Building a Website for My Tennis Coach

Development is paused, and most features in the website preview no longer work.

I was learning tennis from my coach, and one day he told me he wanted a website. I was excited to get started. It felt like a chance to begin freelancing and build something for someone I knew.

Every week, I asked him what he wanted on the website and showed him my progress. We were both excited to see it come together, and those conversations gave me more things to work on between lessons.

I built a working booking system, a WordPress-style image editor and post creation system, direct messaging, and Stripe payments to collect lesson fees. There were a lot of pieces to connect, but I enjoyed seeing the website become something my coach could use to manage his lessons and communicate with students.

However, I started the pricing discussion a little too late. By the time we talked about it, I'd already put a lot of work into the site, and we couldn't agree on a plan. I halted further development and stopped the database and cloud functions, which is why most of the site's features no longer work.

It was a lesson for me to establish expectations clearly and early on, especially around pricing and what the work would include. I was eager to start building, but those conversations needed to happen at the beginning, too.