Gorakhpur City Guide
A digital guide concept for discovering the places, culture, and character of Gorakhpur.
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS
- Vercel
Overview
Explore Gorakhpur is a bilingual (English/Hindi) city guide that presents the city's landmarks, history, food, and nearby excursions in one editorial package. The tagline is “Purvanchal Ki Shaan”, and the design leans into warm, sunset-temple imagery with a big, confident wordmark hero.
The site is live and publicly reachable. It went through several real-world fixes after launch — deep-link routing, an animated about/portfolio section, and SEO tuning — so the case study below reflects the shipped site, not the first draft.
Problem / Goal
City information online tends to be either a dry directory or scattered blog posts. The opportunity was to give one city a single, coherent visual identity — somewhere between a travel magazine and a useful reference — that still worked well on a phone.
Approach
- Editorial layout with large photography-led sections for landmarks, history, excursions, and food.
- Bilingual headings so the site reads naturally for both local and visiting audiences.
- A single-page-app structure with clean deep links, so every section is shareable.
Selected features
- Landmark, history, excursion, and food sections with custom imageryBuilt
- Bilingual English/Hindi typography throughoutBuilt
- Deep-link routing with SPA catch-all rewritesBuilt
- Animated about section doubling as a project portfolioBuilt
- SEO pass: semantic headings, indexed section URLsBuilt
Constraints & challenges
Deep links returned 404s on refresh
The static host served index.html at the root but not at nested paths. The fix was a rewrite rule routing every path to the SPA entry — plus learning that certain config flags silently kill the catch-all, so rewrites had to be the only routing mechanism.
Matching the real place
Landmark imagery had to look like Gorakhpur, not a generic temple render. Sections were revised against real reference photos, and anything that couldn't be verified was redesigned rather than invented.
Outcome & lessons
- 01Hosting configuration is part of the design — a broken refresh is a broken experience.
- 02Reference-first imagery keeps a local project honest.
- 03A personal about-section can double as a portfolio when it's built from real projects.