Behind the site

Wonder Finds is my daughter's shop. She makes the work and I built the thing it sits on.

Hazel is the reason any of this exists. The paintings, the world they come out of, the names, all of that is hers and I don't get a vote. My half is the unglamorous part. I photograph the pieces and pack them so they survive the post. I also look after the payment side and make sure it doesn't lose anybody's money.

Who I am

I'm Mahendra Singh. I lead product and technology in Australian media. I've won a few international awards along the way. There's more detail on my LinkedIn if you want it.

I build digital products for a living, mostly newsrooms and the things that sit around them. This one is a lot smaller than what I do at work and I care about it more, because if I get it wrong then my kid finds out her shop is broken.

How it's built

Every page here is static HTML, generated from a single content file. There's no CMS and no database behind it. When Hazel finishes something I add a few lines to the catalogue, run the build, and it regenerates all the pages along with the sitemap and the structured data in one pass.

Payments go through Stripe. The prices are checked on the server against that same catalogue file, so what gets charged can't drift away from what the page said. The forms post to serverless functions and they still work with JavaScript turned off, which matters more than people think on a bad regional connection.

I kept it deliberately plain. It loads fast, it reads properly in a screen reader, and there is nothing in it that will need rescuing in six months. Hosting is Vercel.