Journal
Notes from actual projects
Written when something turned out to be worth writing down — a measurement that surprised me, a default that was wrong, a decision that took an argument. Everything here comes from work that shipped.
The hour a day nobody put a price on
Publishing your prices costs you the wrong enquiries
The developer changed the code and nothing changed on the site
The map that broke six months after launch
Does your site actually need a CMS?
One catalogue, three languages, not three websites
“What is a service in your business?” — the question that decides your site
The 45 KB you pay for on every single visit
Why your site scores 98 on your laptop and 40 on your customer’s phone
Twenty-one scripts before your customer sees a word
What this journal is
I build websites, booking and quoting systems for car rental and auto services, construction and home services, and the build side for design studios — mostly on WordPress, sometimes not, depending on what the problem needs. This is where I write down the things that turned out to be worth writing down.
That means no listicles and no predictions. Each article starts from something specific: a number I measured, a default that was quietly wrong, a decision that had a real trade-off on both sides. Where I got something wrong, that is in the article too, because the mistake is usually the useful part.
What it covers
Five topics, and they map to the parts of a project where money is actually won or lost.
- Performance — what makes a site slow on a real phone rather than on a developer laptop — compression, caching, third-party scripts, and how to read a performance audit without being fooled by it.
- Security — the defaults that leak information, the checks that take thirty seconds, and the failures that only show up months after launch.
- Architecture — content modelling, multilingual structure, and the decision of whether a site needs a content management system at all.
- Business — the parts of a web project that are commercial rather than technical — publishing prices, the cost of an admin interface nobody designed, who owns a dependency after handover.
- WordPress — specific behaviour that wastes hours and looks like incompetence from both sides.
If something here matches a problem you have, the same thinking is visible in the work, and the fastest way to get a straight answer about your own case is to describe it in writing.