Chief Growth Engineer — chiefgrowthengineer.com

The marketing site for CGE — built as static HTML/CSS/JS with a small PHP contact handler. Designed to be hosted on Afrihost Linux (shared) and auto-deployed via GitHub Actions over FTP.

Stack

• HTML / CSS / vanilla JS for the standalone pages (About, Work, Blog, Contact, 404)
• React 18 + Babel-in-browser for the marketing pages that render from JSX (/index.html, /services/*.html). Source lives in /site/*.jsx. Loads React from unpkg.
• PHP 7+ for the contact-form handler (/contact.php) — uses mail(), no extensions required.
• .htaccess for pretty URLs, security headers, caching, and gzip.

Repo layout

.
├── index.html                  # Home (renders all sections from JSX)
├── about.html
├── work.html
├── contact.html
├── 404.html
├── contact.php                 # Form handler
├── .htaccess                   # Apache config
├── robots.txt
├── sitemap.xml
├── site/                       # JSX source (React components)
│   ├── tokens.jsx              # Design tokens + primitives
│   ├── sections-1.jsx          # Nav, Hero, Marquee, Manifesto, Services
│   ├── sections-2.jsx          # Method, CaseSpotlight, Stack
│   ├── sections-3.jsx          # Thinking, About, Testimonials, Pricing, FAQ, BigCTA, Footer
│   ├── service-data.jsx        # SERVICE_DETAILS dictionary
│   ├── service-page.jsx        # ServicePage template
│   └── app.jsx                 # Home composition
├── services/
│   ├── web-development.html    # Each renders <ServicePage slug="..."/>
│   ├── ppc.html
│   ├── tracking.html
│   ├── business-software.html
│   ├── optimization.html
│   ├── analytics.html
│   └── automation.html
├── blog/
│   ├── index.html              # Field-notes index
│   └── the-best-growth-teams-ship-faster.html
├── assets/
│   ├── css/site.css
│   ├── js/contact.js
│   └── img/favicon.svg
└── .github/workflows/deploy.yml

Local preview

The site is static — any HTTP server will do.

# from the repo root
python3 -m http.server 8000
# or
npx serve .

Open http://localhost:8000/. Note: contact.php needs a PHP-capable server to submit:

php -S localhost:8000

Deployment — Afrihost via GitHub Actions

Every push to main triggers .github/workflows/deploy.yml, which mirrors the repo to your Afrihost public_html/ over SFTP (port 22) using lftp. Afrihost's firewall blocks plain passive FTP, so SFTP is the supported transport. This GitHub Action is the single deploy mechanism — there is no cPanel auto-deploy (the old .cpanel.yml was removed to avoid two systems writing to public_html).

One-time setup

1. Push this repo to GitHub (see the next section).

2. Get FTP credentials from Afrihost. Log into the Afrihost ClientZone → cPanel for chiefgrowthengineer.com. Either use the main cPanel FTP account or create a dedicated one:

   • Server: usually ftp.chiefgrowthengineer.com (or the Afrihost server hostname shown in cPanel)
   • Username: typically youraccount@chiefgrowthengineer.com for an additional account, or your main cPanel user
   • Password: as set
   • Target dir: usually public_html/ (Afrihost shared default). If your account routes the domain to a different folder, note that path.

3. Add the secrets to the GitHub repo at https://github.com/roblouw2nd/cge/settings/secrets/actions:

   • FTP_SERVER — the SFTP/cPanel host (e.g. the Afrihost server hostname, or chiefgrowthengineer.com)
   • FTP_USERNAME — your cPanel username
   • FTP_PASSWORD — the cPanel password
   • (optional) FTP_PORT — defaults to 22. Override if Afrihost uses a custom SSH/SFTP port.
   • (optional) FTP_TARGET_DIR — defaults to public_html. Override if the domain routes elsewhere.

4. Trigger a deploy: push any commit to main, or go to the Actions tab → "Deploy to Afrihost" → "Run workflow".

Notes

• Transport is SFTP over port 22 (set FTP_PORT to override). SFTP/SSH access must be enabled on the Afrihost account — if it isn't, request it via Afrihost support, otherwise the connection step fails.
• mirror --reverse --delete makes the server match the repo, so files removed from the repo are also removed from public_html. Anything that must live only on the server should sit outside public_html.
• The exclude block keeps .git/, .github/, README.md, node_modules/, etc. off the live server.

Push to GitHub

The remote is https://github.com/roblouw2nd/cge. From this folder:

git init
git add .
git commit -m "Initial CGE site"
git branch -M main
git remote add origin https://github.com/roblouw2nd/cge.git
git push -u origin main

After the push, configure the FTP secrets (above) and the next push will deploy automatically.

Contact form / lead backend

contact.php handles the contact page and all /tools/ lead forms. On every valid submission it:

1. Logs the lead to ~/cge-leads.jsonl (one directory above public_html, never deployed, never in git) before attempting mail — a mail outage can't lose a lead.
2. Emails the enquiry to rob@chiefgrowthengineer.com with Reply-To set to the sender.
3. Sends the sender a branded thank-you (multipart plain-text + HTML) containing the booking link (https://calendar.app.google/vXohio54MnjJy57X7) and a copy of what they submitted — for tool leads that means their own scorecard lands in their inbox. Auto-reply failures are logged but never fail the request. Auto-Submitted: auto-replied prevents responder loops.

Protections: honeypot (company_url must be empty), per-IP rate limit (5/hour, timestamp files in ~/cge-ratelimit/, fails open), field-length caps, header-injection stripping.

Transport: if /home/<cpanel-user>/cge-mail-config.php exists (returns ['smtp_user' => ..., 'smtp_pass' => ..., 'smtp_host' => 'smtp.gmail.com', 'smtp_port' => 587]), mail goes out via authenticated Google Workspace SMTP; otherwise it falls back to PHP mail(). Test with a real submission after any deploy.

Editing content

• Marketing/services copy — edit the JSX files in /site/. The browser will Babel-transform on reload.
• Static pages (About, Work, Blog, Contact) — edit the corresponding .html directly.
• New blog post — copy blog/the-best-growth-teams-ship-faster.html to a new file with a clean URL slug, edit the content, and add it to blog/index.html + sitemap.xml.

Going faster (later)

Babel-in-browser is fine for launch but slower on first paint than pre-rendered HTML. When the site has traffic worth optimising for, swap the JSX pages for either:

• An Astro / Next.js static build (export the same components, astro build → dist/ → FTP)
• Server-side render the React components once via react-dom/server in a Node build step.

Either way, no Afrihost config changes needed — the deploy target stays static public_html/.

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© CGE Group · chiefgrowthengineer.com