For the past few years we have been building websites the hard way: custom code on a blank canvas, no themes, no page builders, and a quality bar most shops would call excessive. Industrial distributors, coatings applicators, contractors, manufacturers, and a few products of our own. Along the way we solved hundreds of small, unglamorous problems, and we wrote almost none of it down.
That changes today. This is Field Notes, the working journal of Spider Digital Group. We are launching it with a full archive of posts written now, looking back at what those builds taught us. From here on, we publish weekly.
An honest word about this archive
Every post you see today carries today's date, because today is when it was written. We did not backdate anything, and we will not pretend we kept a diary while we were heads-down shipping. When a post tells the story of an older build, it says so plainly and speaks in hindsight.
That rule matters more than it might seem. A founding law of this studio is that we never fabricate: no invented statistics, no fake testimonials, no claims we cannot stand behind. A blog with fictional timestamps would break that law on day one, so this one starts with the truth instead: we are late to writing, and the material is worth the wait anyway.
What we build
Spider Digital Group is an independent web studio. We design and build fully custom sites, mostly for industrial and contractor businesses: coatings distributors, applicators, manufacturers, construction firms, plus a handful of products under our own roof. Every build starts from a blank canvas, not a theme, and the client owns the code outright.
The numbers behind that sentence are real and traceable. More than ten brands. More than a thousand pages shipped. Sites that run on four to seven runtime dependencies instead of hundreds, and that routinely score 100 where it counts.
Most of that work never got a case study. The migration that moved 893 CMS records and 1,507 assets off a rented platform. The search index that understands "leak" as a query. The wizard that replaced five contact options with one front door. Those stories are the backlog we are publishing today, and they are better told now, with the results in, than they would have been in the moment.
We are also an AI-assisted studio, and we say so out loud. We build with AI models and hold every line of the output to hard quality gates: typecheck, lint, and a full production build green before anything ships, every page reviewed on desktop and on a real phone viewport, every claim checked against a source. AI raised our ceiling. The bar stayed human.
The four categories
Everything we publish here lands in one of four buckets, and the archive launching today seeds all of them.
- Field notes: case stories and hard-won lessons from real builds, like moving 460 pages off Webflow or teaching site search to understand plant-floor language.
- Building with AI: what running an AI-assisted studio actually looks like, told at the level of outcomes and quality gates rather than hype.
- Design: the taste system behind the work, from featured-hero hierarchy and bento grids to why we never ship a wall of text.
- Performance & SEO: how the sites get fast and stay found, from static rendering to structured data, with receipts attached.
Four buckets, one voice. Whether a post is about a migration guard or a hover state, it is written the way we build: plain, specific, and checked.
The rules we write by
The standards that govern our builds govern this blog too. They are short enough to list in full.
- Every number traces to a real build. If we cannot point at the source, we do not publish it.
- Named clients are named with pride. Everyone else stays anonymous, and we respect that more than we want the material.
- Plain English over jargon. If a sentence needs a glossary, we rewrite the sentence.
- The misses get published next to the wins, because the misses taught us more.
Some posts will name names: Belzona Baton Rouge, IMS, AAS, Polymer Nation, America Premier, and other clients whose work we are proud to show. Others will talk about a manufacturer, a church, or a healthcare enterprise without naming them, because not every client wants their engineering discussed in public.
What happens next
Today we publish the backlog: migration stories, search engineering, conversion doctrine, performance work, and the design rules we enforce like law. It is the record we should have been keeping all along, reconstructed honestly from the code and the commits, which never lied.
From next week, one post at a time. If you build for the industrial web, run a business that lives or dies on its site, or are simply curious what an AI-assisted studio with a stubborn quality bar looks like from the inside, we think you will find something here worth your time.
