A static site with exactly one server route
Find out whether anyone wanted a CIPLE course before building one.
A bilingual landing site, English and Portuguese: homepage, how it works, about, FAQ, legal pages, and ten cornerstone SEO articles per language. Waitlist signup on every page with source tracking, which is what makes the exercise answerable, not how many signed up, but from which page.
The build shape is worth reusing. Astro emits static pages plus a Node server
for exactly one route, /api/waitlist, with Caddy in front handling both and
terminating HTTPS automatically. That hybrid is under-used: people either run a
full server because they need one endpoint, or go fully static and bolt on a
third-party form that breaks under content blockers. Client JavaScript is one
Preact island for the form, around 3KB, and zero elsewhere.
Simple Analytics rather than Google, on a site whose whole purpose is asking people for their email address.
The exam-prep product followed from it.