BusinessAsUsual.ie by Annertech, let your customers know you are open during COVID-19
As the global COVID-19 pandemic takes hold across the world, many companies are temporarily closing up, but many more are continuing to serve their customers, albeit maybe a bit differently.
In an effort to help people across Ireland find out what businesses are still trading, we have created BusinessAsUsual.ie, a database of businesses, searchable by county or business type.
It's a free service that we have created in partnership Grow Remote as our way to try help out during the crisis. Anyone can add their business to the website by clicking on the "Add Your Business" button located at the top of each page. This will bring you to a simple form to fill out and we'll use that information to create the website.
We hope you are one of the businesses still operating through the pandemic, either online via your e-commerce website or through whatever other means you can. If so, please add your profile to businessasusual.ie so people will know where to find you.
How We Built It
The website is built by sending data from a Google Form to a Google Spreadsheet. This spreadsheet then feeds to a GatsbyJS (a static site generator built on React) website which checks for updates to the spreadsheet and rebuilds itself via a GitHub Action cronjob every 6 hours if there's new content.
Once live, we enhanced it with a lunr search engine, added offline capabilities, and A2HS (add to home screen) functionality to make it a progressive web app (PWA).
The code for businessasusual.ie was made open source from day one, in case anyone from any other country wanted to replicate it. You can view the source code on GitHub.
