CommuteZA

A product born from a personal challenge.

CommuteZA is a public transport discovery and journey-planning platform built for South African commuters. It brings technical SEO, product thinking and software development together around a practical, everyday need.

The platform has now been live for four months. These early search results show growing demand while the product remains in active development.

Why I Built CommuteZA

When I started my career, I relied on public transport to get to work every day.

Like many South Africans, I searched for routes, pickup locations and transport information across multiple websites, Facebook pages and PDF documents. The answers were often incomplete, outdated or difficult to find.

Working in technical SEO made me realise that the problem was not always a lack of information. It was that the information was not organised around how commuters actually search.

Public transport information in South Africa is fragmented. Operators publish information in different ways, making reliable answers difficult to find quickly.

• Downloadable PDF timetables
• Updates published mainly on social media
• Limited websites with poor search visibility
• Route and pickup information spread across multiple sources

This creates unnecessary friction for people simply trying to get from one place to another.

The vision extends beyond another transport website. I want to build a platform that commuters can use every day to plan journeys with greater confidence.

• Discover transport options
• Compare routes
• Understand pricing
• Find stations and pickup locations
• Plan journeys more efficiently

Before writing code, I wanted to understand how people searched for transport information. The research covered search behaviour, intent, existing results, information gaps, common commuter questions and the way current transport websites organise their content.

Starting with people rather than keywords shaped the design and architecture decisions that followed.

Rather than building pages for search engines, I designed pages to solve user problems. Every page should answer a specific question, every click should reduce friction and every piece of information should move someone closer to their destination.

CommuteZA challenged me to think beyond rankings and balance user needs, scalability and technical constraints.

• Design for mobile-first users
• Prioritise clarity over complexity
• Build reusable page templates
• Create scalable information architecture
• Reduce the clicks needed to reach useful information

The platform is organised around how commuters naturally search rather than how transport operators structure their businesses.

• Transport modes
• Stations
• Routes
• Nearby transport
• Journey planning

This approach supports intuitive navigation and creates a logical internal linking structure that can scale with the product.

CommuteZA combines modern web technologies in an architecture designed for performance, discoverability and long-term maintainability.

Codex acted as a collaborative development partner. It helped build React components, refactor code, debug issues, improve code quality, accelerate repetitive tasks and explore implementation approaches.

The product vision, information architecture, SEO strategy and user experience decisions remained my responsibility. AI created more time for solving problems instead of repeating routine implementation work.

Every project involves trade-offs. The main decisions prioritised a strong, scalable foundation over short-term convenience.

After four months live, CommuteZA has generated more than 10,000 Google impressions and 5,000 Bing impressions. The domain is also seeing more than 3,000 impressions from Bing AI Overviews and earned a mention in Microsoft Copilot within about 30 days.

These are early signals, not a finished growth story. They show that commuters are actively searching for this information and reinforce the long-term direction of the platform. The current focus remains improving the product rather than maximising traffic.

CommuteZA will continue evolving towards a more complete journey-planning experience.

• Interactive route planning
• Journey comparisons
• Transport pricing
• Real-time transport information where available
• Smarter internal search
• Richer structured data
• User accounts and saved journeys

• Real problems lead to meaningful products
• Technical SEO is most effective when combined with product thinking
• Information architecture is as important as content
• AI is a powerful accelerator, but thoughtful decision-making remains human
• Shipping and learning provides more value than waiting for perfection

Building CommuteZA required me to think beyond SEO. I used keyword research to validate demand like a business, made technical decisions around the CMS, APIs and rendering, and considered how the product would be measured through analytics. The project strengthened my ability to connect business goals, search strategy, development and data within one product.