Overview
August Oak Wood Works is a full-stack marketing website and CMS for a custom cabinetry business in Temecula, California. The public site includes Home, About, Why Choose Us, Gallery, Media, Blog, and Contact, with content loaded from a Laravel 11 API and rendered in a Vue 3 SPA. Staff use a dashboard to edit pages, blog posts, gallery images, testimonials, and partner logos without touching code. The backend is Laravel with MySQL. The frontend uses Vite, Pinia, and Vue Router, with Sanctum cookie auth and optional 2FA for admins. The site includes SEO (meta tags, sitemap, robots.txt), a contact form, and role based access for Admin and Editor users. Locally it runs via Docker Compose (Nginx, PHP-FPM, MySQL) production deploys to SiteGround as static Vue files plus Laravel on Apache.
What was included
- Custom marketing website (Home, About, Gallery, Blog, Contact)
- Headless CMS dashboard for non technical content updates
- Blog with rich-text editor and SEO fields
- Gallery with category filters and lightbox
- Contact form with email delivery and spam protection
- Role-based admin (Admin / Editor) with 2FA
- SEO setup (meta tags, sitemap, robots.txt)
- Docker-based local dev environment
- SiteGround production deployment guide
Challenge
August Oak Woodworks needed a modern web presence that reflected the quality of their custom cabinetry, but the owner shouldn’t depend on a developer for every text change, photo upload, or blog post. The site had to be easy for staff to manage, secure enough for business use, and optimized for local search in Temecula Valley, all while staying maintainable on shared hosting.
Approach
Built a Vue 3 SPA frontend backed by a Laravel 11 REST API and MySQL, with a custom CMS dashboard for pages, blog, media, testimonials, and site settings. Used Sanctum cookie auth and optional 2FA for security, server and client side HTML sanitization for user content, and built-in SEO (meta tags, Open Graph, sitemap). Docker Compose supports local development; production deploys to SiteGround as a static frontend with Laravel handling the API and storage.
01
Discovery & planning
Met with the client to understand their business, target audience (Temecula Valley homeowners), and content needs. Mapped the public site (Home, About, Gallery, Blog, Contact) and defined a CMS so the owner could update copy and photos without a developer. Chose Laravel + Vue for a maintainable API and modern frontend.
02
Design & build the public site
Built the marketing site as a Vue 3 SPA with responsive layouts, gallery lightbox, blog, and contact form. Connected pages to a Laravel API so hero text, images, and sections are CMS driven. Added SEO (meta tags, sitemap, Open Graph) and site settings for business info, social links, and contractor license.
03
CMS dashboard & security
Built an admin dashboard for pages, blog posts, media, testimonials, and partner logos. Added role-based access (Admin / Editor), Sanctum cookie auth, optional 2FA, HTML sanitization, and rate limiting on login and contact. Used Tiptap for rich-text editing and structured content editors for page specific fields.
04
Deploy & handoff
Set up Docker for local development and documented production deployment to SiteGround (Apache + PHP + MySQL). Built the frontend for production, configured mail for the contact form, and handed off a dashboard the client can use day to day, with deployment docs for future maintenance.
Next step
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