← All work

youngi-piano.com

A Korean-first bilingual site with no second language bolted on

Role
Sole developer
Period
2026
Status
In production
Stack
Astro · Cloudflare Pages · i18n
2
locales
0
external requests

A portfolio and lesson site for a pianist and teacher in Gyeonggi-do, Korean at the root and English under /en/, built entirely static and serving every byte from its own origin.

01Which language is the original

Korean is not a translation here - it is the version that governs, including legally, and English is the translation of it. That decision shows up in the routing: locales are explicit files, not a dynamic segment, so Korean keeps unprefixed URLs and the hreflang pairs stay correct in both directions.

The legal texts are deliberately not symmetrical. A privacy notice written for Korean law is not the same document with different words, so they are maintained as two separate texts, because a translation would claim an equivalence that does not exist.

02What the site does not have

No address, no directions, no map. Lessons happen at the student’s home and she travels to them, so a location on the page would not be redundant, it would be false.

Nothing loads from a third party - no third-party fonts, no analytics, no embeds - which is why the privacy policy is four lines long and all of them are true. Everything about the person lives in one data file, so navigation, footer, meta tags, structured data and legal pages all follow from a single edit.

Questions about this project?

I am happy to walk through the architecture, the parts that did not work, or the code itself.