AO Studios - Marketing Site for a Long Island Auto Studio

Project Overview:

Alpha & Omega Studios is a one-owner shop on Long Island doing window tint, paint protection film, vinyl wraps, and graphics on cars, boats, homes, and businesses. Gary, the owner, had spent 20 years building a reputation as a certified PPF installer, but the only proof of that online was scattered reviews and Instagram posts. The site's job was to do the trust-building a stranger needs before they'll call a stranger's shop: show the work, show the reviews, make it obvious where he covers and when he's open, and get a quote request moving before someone bounces to a competitor's tab.

Approach & Process:

Built as a fast, mobile-first Next.js site, since most of these searches happen on a phone standing next to the car. A few decisions came straight from how the business actually runs:

Trust up front. The Google rating and review count sit in the header, not buried on an About page for a service this hands-on, social proof has to land before the scroll does.
Split by service, not by page. Automotive, residential, commercial, and marine customers are looking for completely different things; tabbed categories let each one skip straight past the parts that don't apply to them.
Service area as a feature, not a footnote. An embedded map plus a plain list of the counties and boroughs he covers, because "do you even come to my town" is the first question a lot of these leads have.
Always-visible contact. Phone number and hours pinned in the header, Gary's appointment-only, so a lead who can't immediately see when he's reachable is a lead who leaves.

Outcome & Impact:

The site shipped and is live at aostudiosny.com.

Questions I get a lot.

Why go back for a CS degree if you were already at $170k?

Because the work had already outrun the paperwork, and I was tired of that gap. I’d walked away from two schools already — Baruch didn’t even offer a CS degree, and by BMCC I was already writing production code, so sitting through intro classes for a piece of paper felt backwards. I enrolled at WGU in 2024, kept the full-time engineering job, and finished the B.S. in August 2026. Third school. First degree, eight years later than the “normal” path. I wanted the foundation, and I wanted to close a loop I’d left open twice.

How did you get hired without a degree?

I showed work. The first scripts were for my dad’s business in 2017, automating the data entry that was eating his week. Columbia’s coding bootcamp gave me three months of full-stack JavaScript and a cohort in 2019 — a program that doesn’t even exist anymore. PLNETWORKS hired me in 2020 on a portfolio, not a diploma. After that, each role was about what I’d already shipped: production bugs, HIPAA software, storefronts. The degree came eight years later. It didn’t open the first door.

What actually moved compensation from $75k to $170k?

Two years of shipping at PLNETWORKS, then a move to Cazton that roughly doubled it, then BrightInsight in 2022 — HIPAA-regulated software at $170k. Same skills, different rooms. The market paid for proof. I treated interviews like case studies of work I’d already done, not like a plea for a first chance.

Where are you from, and where are you now?

I was raised in Jamaica, Queens. First thirteen years in an attic. I live in Hell’s Kitchen now. The city didn’t get bigger. I just moved west of the same story.

How do you actually use Cursor and Claude?

As a tutor and a pair, not as a ghostwriter. I still read the diff. I still throw away the parts that look clever and aren’t. The tools make the boring parts faster so I can spend the hours on the decisions that have to be mine.

What would you tell someone learning to code right now?

Build something your family can use. Put it in public. Don’t wait for a school to bless the start. I dropped out twice, then finished. Both of those were the right call at the time.