TuinKlussen.be

Someone wanting their hedge trimmed rings four firms, gets no answer from two and a price without explanation from one. And anyone handy in a garden has no way of finding that work nearby, except through a Facebook group where everything is buried within a day.

Building a marketplace that fixes this means serving both sides at once, and both have to get something before the other side exists. That is the hard part: an empty site still has to look complete. On top of that it had to be local, because a gardener from Ostend is not driving to Genk for two hours of mowing, and friendly enough to get people over the line who have never outsourced anything online.

Built entirely by me in PHP with my own structure, no framework around it. That keeps it light and means I can still work in it a year from now without reading someone else's documentation.

The job flow is the core. A garden owner posts a job with photos for free, gardeners respond with a price, the owner compares profiles and reviews, picks one and arranges the rest through messages on the site. Afterwards they rate each other, both ways, and only people who actually worked a job together can do that.

Local means real distances. Every Belgian postcode is in the database, so a search works in kilometres rather than provinces. Gardeners set their own radius and only get emailed about jobs inside it. Jobs expire after thirty days, with a reminder first, so the list does not fill up with work that was done long ago.

For the brand I came up with De Tuinploeg: ten animated characters, one per type of garden work, with Pierre the earthworm as host. They blink, follow your mouse and occasionally jump. They are drawn as SVG in the page itself, so they stay sharp and cost almost nothing to load. They also do real work: they sit on the category tiles, in the search bar and on cards for jobs without a photo, so an empty list never looks bare.

On top of that runs a whole findability layer: a page per type of garden work, a page per province and per municipality, a garden guide whose seasonal articles shift with the month, structured data, a sitemap, and a cookie banner where the analytics only load after consent. Municipality pages stay out of Google until there is enough on them.

Behind the scenes sits an admin layer with roles and badges, blocked accounts and a log of every administrator action.

A working platform that is live and where the two sides can grow independently. Nine types of garden work, the whole of Flanders covered, distances down to the postcode, and a brand people remember because there is a worm in a flat cap living in it.

Mobile first, because that is where someone in a garden reaches for their phone. Payments through the site are ready as the next step, once the legal side is settled.