Considered long-form writing on websites, craft, and small businesses. Build notes on real client work, notes on the speculative builds — clearly marked, because those businesses are invented — and Site of the Month, a careful monthly critique of a site made by someone else.
An ice cream maker on the Yorkshire coast, same family since 1879. Everyone pictures a seafront kiosk; most of the money arrives through the wholesale door. Plus why half the figures on the finished site are deliberately still blank.
Read the essay →A dog-walking business in Beverley, named after my cockapoo. The website was finished in two days and then sat there, unlaunched, for weeks — on purpose. Plus the spreadsheet that told me which of my own services loses money.
Read the essay →Bytelore teaches ten subjects in three-minute lessons. Building the delivery mechanism took a fortnight; having a hundred lessons worth delivering took rather longer. And then three letters in a config file nearly took the whole thing down.
Read the essay →PriceScout lets you photograph a thing and find the cheapest live price for it in the UK. The part everyone asks about is the photograph. The part that actually shaped the product was the invoice.
Read the essay →Sixty years on Wilbert Lane. A national Retail Florist of the Year title. Flowers for a royal visit. All of it true, all of it already on the website, and all of it arriving in paragraph three — on a homepage whose only heading belongs to the cookie popup.
Read the essay →A picture framer five minutes from my desk has been doing the same job longer than I’ve been alive. 272,000 pictures framed, the frame for a picture presented to the Queen, and a homepage that tells you none of it. Three lifts I’d make, on the house.
Read the essay →Six finished websites for businesses that do not exist. The briefs are real problems, the builds are real and working, and the companies are invented — names, people, prices and phone numbers all fictional. They are kept apart from the notes above, and off /work, so a demo is never mistaken for a client.
A maker who sells eleven times a year, in person, at guitar shows. Every instinct says build a shop. The brief said build a tour poster.
Single-item stock breaks every ecommerce pattern there is. No restock, no size run, no more like this. The fix was to stop apologising for it.
Industrial contracting is bought by people with a production line stopped. Reassurance is worth less than a phone number and a response time.
Nobody researches a cafe. They check whether you are open, where you are, and what the food is like — usually one-handed, in the rain.
Salon pricing is where trust is won or lost, and the whole industry hedges. Publishing the real number costs nothing and removes the main reason somebody books elsewhere.
An emergency trade site has one job. Somebody with a ceiling coming down is not reading your about page.