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Nerd News.

What we learn shipping real sites, written down while it still stings: building with AI, design calls, and the performance work behind the numbers.

Field notesLatest

Opening the field notes

We have spent years shipping custom-coded, AI-assisted sites and writing almost none of it down. Today we publish the backlog, and weekly from here.

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Field notes15
Building with AI8
Design8
Performance & SEO9

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01Field notes15 notes

470 pages of local SEO from one data library

How we built a 470-page site for a residential contractor, with 417 structured sub-service pages that each map to something homeowners actually search.

88 videos, zero third-party bytes

How we built an 88-video library where no YouTube code loads until a visitor presses play, with structured data so search engines still see them.

A distributor map with no API keys

How we put 89 distributor locations on an interactive map with zero API keys and zero monthly bill: geocode once at build time, then serve static JSON.

A pixel-for-pixel re-platform, measured from the live DOM

How we cloned Prime Coat's live Webflow site onto Next.js by measuring the real DOM, 132 pages with matching slugs, so the cutover needs no redirects.

A static site the client edits live

How a 109-product industrial catalog stays a fast static site while the client edits it live through our portal, with changes on the page in seconds.

Buyers search problems, not SKUs

Plant-floor buyers type "leak" and "rust", not product codes. How hand-built synonym maps and static search indexes meet them where they are.

Designing reverence: a church site outside our comfort zone

Why we built a warm ivory and serif design system for a church, and a liturgical season engine that re-themes the whole site from pure date math forever.

Flying visitors over a photorealistic 3D town

A digital archive for a historic town: camera flights over a photorealistic 3D model, record cards anchored to real coordinates, and a graceful 2D fallback.

How we stopped losing leads

Honeypots that fake success to bots, per-IP rate limits, and forms that fail loud with a phone number. How we made lead delivery fail-closed.

Moving 460 pages off Webflow without losing one

How we moved an entire Webflow CMS into a typed data layer: 893 records, 1,507 re-hosted assets, and a build that fails if one old CDN URL survives.

One form to rule every CTA

Every call to action on our sites opens the same multi-step wizard. Why scattering five contact options loses leads, and how one path converts.

Product data is the real website

Why our 400-page catalogs stay maintainable: typed data pipelines, fail-loud build guards, and gap reports that surface missing specs instead of guessing.

Twenty-four designs, one brand

Instead of one mockup, we built a client 24 complete homepage directions on a single route, each production-grade, and let them flip through live and pick.

Why industrial catalogs should be static

We render 200 to 500 page industrial catalogs as fully static files. The case for speed, resilience, and zero CMS attack surface, with real numbers.

WordPress to Next.js without losing Google

How we re-platformed a federal IT contractor from WordPress to Next.js with 301 middleware that catches every legacy URL, Yoast sitemaps included.

02Building with AI8 notes

Building with AI

AI search is the new front page

More buyers ask AI engines and read one answer instead of ten links. The plumbing we ship so clients get cited: entity graphs, llms.txt, answer-shaped pages.

Building with AI

AI writes the code. Humans hold the bar.

Our stance on AI-assisted engineering: the model writes the code, and nothing ships without green builds, full-page review, and screenshot verification.

Building with AI

Answer-shaped writing: copy an answer engine can lift

How we write copy that answer engines can quote: one idea per section, honest question headings, plain definitions first, and a technical version on demand.

Building with AI

Claude 2 to Claude 5: what actually changed

A working history of Claude 2, 3, 3.5, 4, and 5: how each public generation changed production web work, from autocomplete to whole features.

Building with AI

The tells of an AI template site

Blue-to-violet gradients, round 100% stats, em-dash copy, stock desk photos: how to spot an AI template site, and the details expert work gets right.

Building with AI

Welcoming the AI crawlers: a robots file that says yes

How we made a contractor site readable to the machines that answer: 18 named AI crawlers welcomed, an llms.txt companion, and IndexNow pings on deploy.

Building with AI

What AI can't fake: integrity as strategy

Anyone can generate a plausible website in an afternoon now. Verifiable truth is the differentiator: every number traces to a real build, or it does not ship.

Building with AI

Why we standardized on Claude

What we compared when we standardized on Claude, why long-context code quality and instruction-following won, and what one model family changed.

03Design8 notes

Bento beats bullets: why every grid needs a featured tile

Why we turn flat lists into bento grids with one featured tile: hierarchy tells a visitor what matters first. An equal-weight grid is a decision nobody made.

Dark is a design language, not an inversion

Dark-first design done properly: surfaces lifted off pure black, cool undertone ramps, AA-tuned text tiers, and why inverted light sites always feel wrong.

Hierarchy from size, not decoration

The most important thing on the page should simply be the biggest. One featured element leads, supporting pieces follow, and nothing begs for attention.

Mobile is its own design, not a squeezed desktop

A phone layout is a deliberate design, not a shrunken desktop. Single-column heroes, thumb-size targets, safe-area gutters, and proof at a real viewport.

Motion that earns its place

Animation guides the eye or it gets cut. How we gate every effect behind reduced motion, and why we just slowed our own homepage marquee to a third speed.

No stock photos: real photography or nothing

A stock photo pretending to be your team erodes trust on sight. How we source, verify, and place real project photography, and what we do when none exists.

The three-second scan: our first law of layout

Never ship a wall of text. Every section has to survive a three-second scan, and prose past three paragraphs gets restructured, never rewritten or cut.

Web trends 2022 to 2026: what died and what stuck

Preloader curtains, scroll-jacking, glass on everything, AI gradients: a look back at the web trends of 2022 to 2026 that died, and the ones that stuck.

04Performance & SEO9 notes

Performance & SEO

A privacy policy that matches the code

Legal pages written as typed data that mirrors what the site actually does: if the policy says nothing tracks before consent, the render tree enforces it.

Performance & SEO

Engineering the first second

The LCP levers that survived production: CSS keyframe hero entrances, per-role image quality, priority preloads, and the over-compressed hero trap.

Performance & SEO

JSON-LD that tells the truth

Structured data as an honesty exercise: entity graphs generated from the same typed data the pages render, and a hard rule against fake star ratings.

Performance & SEO

Most cookie banners are theater

Most consent banners sit on top of trackers that already fired. Ours gate structurally: no script, no request, no cookie until opt-in, and GPC is honored.

Performance & SEO

Own your accessibility layer

We built our accessibility widget in-house: 7 one-click profiles, 23 adjustments, contrast that remaps design tokens, shipped as code the client owns.

Performance & SEO

Redirects are SEO insurance

Redirect hygiene for replatforms: every legacy URL 301s in exactly one hop, redirect maps live as typed data, and slug parity can erase the problem.

Performance & SEO

Security headers for small businesses

Why contractor sites deserve enterprise posture: full security-header suites, per-directive reasoning, rate-limited APIs, and honeypots that fake success.

Performance & SEO

What a real Lighthouse 100 actually takes

Lab scores drift, Chrome's LCP heuristics have traps, and animated pages trade points for character. What a genuine 100 takes, and when we accept a 96.

Performance & SEO

Zero hydration: one small island, no framework tax

Server components by default plus one small vanilla JS island for reveals and hovers. Main-thread blocking measured at zero, no animation library needed.

Nerd News Archive18 chapters

Our road from WordPress to fully custom, retold in the voice of each moment. A story written today, told as chapters, not a dated record.

The WordPress years

01Living in Divi4 min
02The thirty-plugin stack4 min
03Chasing Yoast green lights4 min
04SEO when Google gets helpful4 min
05The Reels pivot: short video eats small-business marketing4 min
06Goodbye, Universal Analytics: the GA4 migration4 min

The Webflow years

07Why I left WordPress for Webflow4 min
08Webflow ate my plugin folder4 min
09Designing in the browser4 min
10Templates, wireframes, libraries, or scratch4 min
11Handing clients the keys4 min
12The day ChatGPT landed4 min
13Search starts answering4 min

The custom years

14The ceiling of no-code4 min
15Going fully custom4 min
16When custom got cheap4 min

Now

17How people browse now4 min
18The road here4 min

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