Al-Andalus Motors

A friend connected Muhammed with a car dealership owner who wanted a website to showcase his vehicles. The owner had already gotten quotes from other developers and they were expensive for what he actually needed.

Looking past the initial ask, the real shape of the business became clear: a dealership isn't running a shop with a cart and a checkout. Its whole job is connecting a buyer with the right vehicle. The actual sale happens in conversation, not on a webpage.

Once that was clear, the scope followed from it. No cart, no accounts, no online payment adding any of that would have built infrastructure this business had no use for, while adding real cost to a project the owner was already being quoted too much for. Two things actually needed solving: getting a visitor from a vehicle category to a WhatsApp conversation as fast as possible, and giving a non-technical owner a way to run the catalogue himself, without calling a developer for every small change.

The owner wasn't technical at all, so the first step wasn't code it was questions. How many kinds of vehicles does the showroom carry? Three: passenger cars, pickups, minibuses. From there, Muhammed researched what specs actually matter to someone shopping in each category, instead of guessing at a data model.

The architecture followed the same serverless pattern already proven on other projects: Firebase Auth and Firestore directly, security enforced through Firestore's own rules rather than a custom backend, Cloudinary handling image delivery instead of Firebase Storage. For a catalogue this size, standing up a dedicated server would have been overhead the project didn't need.

Two sides working together. On the visitor side: a public catalogue split by category, each vehicle listing its real specs with a direct line to WhatsApp. On the owner's side: a plain dashboard where he can add a vehicle, mark one as featured for the homepage, check visitor counts, and control what shows where between the homepage and the full vehicles page.

Server-side rendering runs underneath both, for a reason tied to how the owner actually works — he shares vehicle links straight into WhatsApp and Facebook chats, and those links need to show a real title, price, and photo the instant they're pasted, not a blank preview. Firestore's rules are the only thing standing between a visitor and the data, including one that lets anyone increment the view counter by exactly one and nothing else, so the number can't be forged.

The owner was happy with the result and manages the catalogue himself now — adding vehicles, updating status, marking featured listings — without needing a developer for routine changes. A post-launch review also caught a malformed WhatsApp number in the owner's settings that was breaking every "contact us" button on the live site; flagged for him to fix, since it's content only he controls.