Behind the Build
Web craft, design, and performance lessons from building and rebuilding our own site and our clients' sites.
This pillar is where we write about web craft, design and performance, drawn from building and rebuilding our own site and the sites we make for clients. If you are rebuilding a site, or have to sign off on one, every choice, from a video to a font to a new page, costs speed or trust when it is wrong.
The scope is craft and restraint: what earns a place on a page, what slows it down, and how to tell whether work is really finished. The first post asks what belongs in a video on a service website. Its test puts four questions to a video before it ships: which kind of motion it is, whether every word and number already lives in the page, whether the colors come from the site's own palette, and whether the video adds anything the page does not already say. The common failure it names is a slow zoom on a stock photo, which adds a file to load and nothing to read.
Expect decisions an owner can make, not code to write. You do not need a developer's vocabulary to follow along. We plan to cover other design and performance choices in the same plain terms, and where a post gets technical, the aim is to tell you what to ask for rather than how to build it.
Before your next page goes live, run any video on it past those four questions. A single no means the page is better off with plain markup. These lessons shape the sites we build for service businesses, and our web design page shows that work.
Every post in Behind the Build
Did the scheduled job run, or only fire?
A scheduled job can start on time and leave nothing behind. Here is the one quick check per job that separates fired from done.
What belongs in a video on a service website
The rule we use before any video goes on a page: it moves in a way CSS cannot, and every word and number stays in the page itself.
Want to talk through your marketing?
Tell us where things stand and we'll tell you plainly what we'd do next.