Filaoro

Context

An online shop for stamps from Spain and around the world: unique pieces and complete collections, with a gram of gold as a gift for every tier of purchase.

Philately has an entry problem: people who don’t collect don’t know what they’re looking at. The site had to sell to collectors and, at the same time, explain to everyone else why a stamp is worth what it’s worth.

Approach

• Education before catalogue. What philately is, themes by art, sport, fauna, flora, geography and history, the Europa series and the world’s famous stamps. Every page teaches something and ends by leading to specific pieces in the shop.
• One switch for the sales channel. The whole interface depends on a single constant: off, every piece is reserved over WhatsApp; on, the cart and payment appear. Pieces delivered by hand always stay on WhatsApp.
• The build refuses to ship half-finished content. If it finds provisional prices, pending placeholders, example domains or a blocking robots.txt, it fails. It also writes the commit being served to health.json.
• Animation that never leaves text half-visible. Entrances use clip-path and transform, not opacity: a semi-transparent headline drops to 1.24:1 contrast mid-animation, and this way that never happens. No smooth scroll, on purpose: the audience is older and scrolling has to behave the way it always has.
• Built for search engines and AI assistants. AI crawlers explicitly allowed, an llms.txt generated from the catalogue, a public catalogo.json, FAQ structured data and a social image per page.

What I built

• Static Astro architecture with content collections for pieces and themes
• A complete educational section on philately, cross-linked to the shop
• Shop with filters, a page per piece, cart and gateway payment
• A single switch between WhatsApp reservations and online purchase
• Build guards against provisional content, and health.json with the commit
• Design system with Playfair Display and Inter, and a two-tone rule per colour to meet AA contrast
• Contact form, security headers and legal pages
• Unit and end-to-end tests for accessibility, filters and visual regression

Outcome

Live on its own domain since September 2026. A niche shop that also works as a way into the hobby.

A note on this work

Built at Xpandex, where I ran the full cycle: design, development, performance, accessibility, technical SEO and deployment. After launch, another team member redesigned the home page and switched on online payment on top of the existing shop.