Ahmed Viquas
Expert UI/UX Design & Dev: WordPress, Framer, Webflow
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My family's venue waited 18 years for a website. My clients never waited a day.
In 13 years of freelancing, I never missed a client deadline. But VIK Convention Hall, my family's wedding venue in Hunsur, Karnataka ran for 18 years on directory listings, a phone number, and a paper register. That's the freelancer's curse: our best work goes to strangers, our leftovers to the people we love. The #base44giveitaglowchallenge finally gave me a reason to treat my own family like my best client.
THE BUSINESS
VIK Convention Hall (VIK Kalyana Mantapa), Reshme Market Road, Hunsur — my family's venue since 2008. 1,500+ weddings hosted, capacity for 1,000 guests, 15,000 sq ft, 5 guest rooms, in-house catering. A single booking is worth ₹40,000, and for 18 years every one of them depended on someone catching a phone call. The "before" was directory pages we don't control: Justdial, WeddingBazaar, Mandap.com (http://Mandap.com), Google business page No photos of ours, no pricing, no way to check a date.
THE PRODUCT
Live: https://vik-covention-hall.base44.app
A complete booking platform, not a brochure — mobile-first, because every family here plans weddings from a phone.
Live availability calendar. Families see exactly which dates are open before they ever call. It also highlights upcoming muhurtham (auspicious) dates in Karnataka, families choose wedding dates by auspicious days, so the calendar speaks the language our customers actually plan in. Tapping an open date starts an inquiry with the date pre-filled.
Event planner. A step-by-step builder where families pick their spaces (main hall, dining hall, guest suites), decoration style, catering type, and services — and see an estimate range before the first phone call. It turns a vague inquiry into a qualified one.
Real content. Real photos of our hall, real ₹ pricing, real booking terms (25% advance confirms the date). Nothing invented — judges can call the number and reach my family.
THE AUTOMATION (all working, shown in the video)
Inquiry → instant WhatsApp alert. The moment an inquiry lands, Twilio fires a WhatsApp message to the phone that has answered VIK's calls since 2008 — date, event type, guest count, contact. Response time drops from "whenever we check missed calls" to instant.
Automatic date protection. When a booking is confirmed or held, the date locks on the public calendar by itself. The double-booking risk of a paper register, the thing that actually keeps venue owners up at night is gone.
Pipeline, not inbox. Every inquiry is tracked through stages: Inquiry → Site Visit → Tentative Hold → Advance Paid → Confirmed, with payments recorded against each booking. One-tap WhatsApp buttons send the customer status updates matched to each stage.
No lead left behind. Even partially completed plans are saved with a phone number, so a family that hesitated on Tuesday gets a call back on Wednesday before, they simply vanished.
THE STORY
Video walkthrough (before → after): https://youtu.be/b4bwzwh3EsU
WHY IT MATTERS
This isn't a concept venue or a demo build. It's my family's hall, the calendar will hold our real bookings, and the alerts go to our real phone. Adoption isn't a promise it's how VIK takes bookings starting this week. The challenge didn't just produce a website; it broke a 13-year pattern of giving my best work to everyone but my own people. If you freelance, you have your own VIK. Give it the client treatment.
Thank you to all the builders in the #base44giveitaglowchallenge, and to @Base44 for giving me the reason to finally build for my own people. Eighteen years overdue, done in a week. There are still edges to polish, but that's the point. This isn't a challenge entry that dies on the deadline. It's my family's booking system now, and I'll keep refining it until it's as sharp as anything I've shipped for a client.
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CrawlX
CrawlX crawls a website, surfaces its technical SEO problems, and explains each one in plain language with a suggested fix. Cloud-native, fast, and built for teams. I built it from a blank page: product, brand, and engineering.
The gap
The technical SEO crawler market is led by Screaming Frog, a desktop tool with a dated interface, no AI, and a one-person, one-machine model. No sharing, no assigning issues, no client portals.
At the other end, enterprise crawlers like Lumar are fast but cost $15k to $50k a year.
That left a clear gap: enterprise speed, a modern interface, AI built in, and pricing a small team can actually afford.
Positioning
Linear meets Datadog for SEO. A crawler that does not just hand you a list of errors. It tells you what each one means and how to fix it.
What I built
1. Product, engineering, and brand, end to end.
2. 400+ SEO checks across 12 analysis modules
3. An AI layer on the Claude API: plain-English explanations, auto-generated fix code, and a conversational assistant you can ask about your own crawl
4. Six core screens, including a live crawl view, a Kanban issue explorer, a site-architecture visualizer, and a white-label report builder
5. An AI search-readiness module that checks whether pages are built for AI answer engines, a gap no competitor covers
6. Rust crawl workers hitting 350 to 450 URLs per second, matching enterprise tools, with ClickHouse handling billion-row crawl data
What makes it different
1. AI intelligence no legacy crawler offers: explanations, fix code, and a chat assistant, not static hints
2. Enterprise-class crawl speed at small-team pricing
3. Team-first: assign issues to developers, share client portals, comment in place, instead of one license per machine
4. Built into the pipeline: CI/CD on GitHub Actions and Vercel catches SEO regressions before they ship
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Boat Trips Club runs boat tours across several destinations, with operations spread across locations like Cancun and Cabo San Lucas. We took on the parts of the business customers never see but the business depends on: a slow website, a tangled Zoho CRM, broken tracking, and a fragmented multi-domain setup. The goal was a fast, measurable platform the business could grow on, fixed without taking the live operation offline.
The situation
Four problems, all live at once.
The website ran slow. CPU stayed pinned for over a month, with no caching and failing Core Web Vitals
A migration from older location domains into boattripsclub.com (http://boattripsclub.com) had left hundreds of broken internal links and long redirect chains
The Zoho CRM took nearly 20 seconds to load a single customer record
Tracking was incomplete. Paid ad spend could not be connected to actual bookings
Website performance
We diagnosed the slowdown as a CPU problem, not memory or workers, and the data showed it was chronic, not a one-off spike.
We installed and configured LiteSpeed Cache and Autoptimize: page, object, and browser caching, CSS and JS minification, and deferred render-blocking assets. The Core Web Vitals issues resolved and the site stabilized after weeks of strain.
Domain consolidation and SEO
The migration into a single domain had broken the site's internal linking. We mapped 11 URL redirects from the old location domains into boattripsclub.com (http://boattripsclub.com), fixed more than 350 broken internal links with WP-CLI search-replace across the full database, then cleaned the redirect chains caused by missing trailing slashes and wrong slugs. Every change was followed by a clean cache purge so the fixes held.
Zoho CRM engineering
The customer detail function in Zoho was taking 19.5 seconds to return one record. The cause was an N+1 query pattern: one API call per booking inside a loop, plus a referral lookup in the same loop. For a customer with 35 bookings, that was around 70 sequential API calls.
We rewrote it to batch the calls outside the loop. The result was 19.5 seconds down to 1.17 seconds, with identical output. We also fixed an HTML entity encoding bug in product names and a second function carrying the same N+1 problem.
Analytics and attribution
We implemented GA4 and Meta Pixel across the site and added GCLID and fbclid capture so every ad click can be traced to a booking. The key move was feeding booking revenue from Bokun and Zoho back into the ad platforms, so campaigns optimize for real return on ad spend, not clicks or form fills.
Strategy and roadmap
Beyond the fixes, we mapped where the business could go: a phased menu of services across customers, staff, operations, and marketing, then scoped a custom operating system to replace WordPress first, then Zoho, in stages. The guiding rule was simple, replace before adding. Every phase replaces something that exists today, so the live business never breaks.
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ItsWare: Streamlining Asset Management, Framer Website
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UI/UX Design - Crafting Intuitive & Impactful Product Experience
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Wordpress Portfolio
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