Proof of work
5 checks that can stop a site from going live.
Every site we build has to pass 5 checks we wrote ourselves. Each one exists because something went wrong on a real job and we weren't going to let it happen twice. They aren't reports. If a site fails one, it doesn't launch.
5 checks
Written in-house
Run on every build
Why any of this exists
The quiet faultsThe expensive problems on a website are the quiet ones. A site that breaks gets fixed the same day because everyone can see it. A site where the brand font never loads, the contact form never records anything, or half the old links died in the rebuild looks fine and costs you money for years. Nobody reports it because nothing looks wrong. Every check below exists because one of those ran for months on a real site before anyone caught it.
The checks
Each one came from a real mistakeYou can't buy these. We wrote all 5, in the order we got burned.
The gate in order, every build
- The copy check sloplint
- The look check designlint
- The font check
- The link check
- The first-impression check
- Launch
A fail stops the build until it's fixed.
The copy check
Your site gets one shot at sounding like you. This check holds a list of 87 phrases that show up on every third small business site in the country: the line about being nestled somewhere, the superlative with nothing behind it, the reassurance that promises nothing. One of them anywhere in your copy and the site doesn't build.
The list isn't printed here because this check runs on this page too. Quoting the examples failed it twice while this paragraph was being written. That's about as good a demo as we could ask for.
The look check
A site can be technically fine and still look like nobody made it. This check measures what gives that away: caps used as decoration, letter-spacing stretched across body text, and fonts named in the code that never load. One site we audited named 5 fonts and delivered 2. Half its typography was falling back to a system default and nobody had noticed.
The font check
You can buy a typeface, install it correctly, reference it correctly, and never see it on your own site. If the file is broken a certain way, every browser rejects it and swaps in a system font. Nothing errors and the page looks fine. We found this on a client site where it had been happening for 4 months, on the typeface their whole brand was built on. This check opens every font file we're handed and stops the build if a browser would reject it.
The link check
This is the one that costs real money. When a site gets rebuilt, the old page addresses usually change. Every link anyone ever built to you and every ranking you earned in Google now point at a dead page. Traffic doesn't drop on launch day, which is why nobody connects the two. It drops about 6 weeks later.
The off-the-shelf tool for this breaks on any site big enough to need it, so we wrote our own. It runs before we publish, and a page is only allowed to disappear if it redirects somewhere real.
The first-impression check
A page loads in 2 stages. The first is a small copy of the design carried inside the page so something shows up immediately. When that copy falls out of sync with the real stylesheet, first-time visitors see a flash of the old colors before the page settles. You never see it because your browser has the site cached. New visitors do, and those are the people you're paying to reach. This check compares the two on every build. It caught an old brand color still flashing months after a rebrand.
Run against this page
Not a screenshotWe wouldn't sell a copy check and skip running it on our own site. Here are the first two, run against the page you're reading.
$ sloplint this site 0 problems found PASS $ designlint this site 0 problems found PASS
29 pages of our own copy and zero banned phrases. It's a low bar. Almost nobody in this business clears it.
$ lighthouse / --preset=perf --form-factor=mobile Performance 100 Accessibility 100 Best practices 100 SEO 100 Largest Contentful Paint 1.0 s (Google's bar: 2.5 s) Cumulative Layout Shift 0 (bar: 0.1) Total Blocking Time 0 ms (bar: 200 ms)
Lab numbers on a simulated slow phone. Your connection will differ. What matters is what they cost: nothing. No plugin to buy, no optimization retainer. The page is fast because there's nothing in it but the words and the pictures.
Our own blank template will not publish
On purposeRun the same checks against the starter we begin every project from and they refuse it 177 times. Every field that hasn't been filled in yet counts as a fault: the fake phone number, the heading still describing the demo, the filler text in the footer.
That's the point
The most common way a small business site embarrasses itself is a placeholder nobody replaced, live for a year. A phone number on the contact page that rings nowhere. A photo caption describing a different company. Here the launch is blocked until every one of them is gone.
Where the variety comes from
The libraryIf a studio only has one look, you're buying a template. These 5 sites look nothing alike because none of them started from a blank page or a purchased theme.
300 design directions
On file before we start
- Each one is a complete direction: a palette, a typeface pairing, a section rhythm, and how much motion it can take before it looks cheap.
- Every entry says when not to use it. The one that needs a real writer is marked wrong for a client with 3 sentences of copy. That line has saved more projects than the palettes.
- Finished work goes back in. The look we built for the detailing shop is now a reusable system, so the next client in that world starts from something proven.
Written down afterwards
So it stops happening
- A list of what makes a site look machine-made, including the habits we're guilty of ourselves.
- Rules for location pages, including a hard rule against shipping a page whose only local content is the town name.
- A file of what we tried, shipped, and regretted, kept where the next build has to walk past it.
What the other quote doesn't include
Side by sideThe usual local build
What the quote covers
- A purchased theme, and whatever it happens to do.
- Copy written once and never checked against anything.
- Fonts that may or may not be loading. Nobody has looked.
- Tracking installed and never tested.
- Old links dropped on launch day, noticed 6 weeks later.
- Software that needs updating forever, by somebody.
What ships here
Same price bracket
- 5 checks that can stop the launch.
- 87 phrases banned from your copy.
- Every font opened and verified before it ships.
- Every form and phone button tested live before launch.
- Every old link redirected to its real replacement.
- Nothing to update and no admin login to break into.
Why none of this is normal
It takes a week of unpaid work to build a tool whose only job is to say no, and a shop turning out 40 sites a year has no reason to write one. We wrote 5 because each one is a mistake we only had to make once.
Want the 5 checks run on your site?
Send us the address. You get the findings in plain English, whether or not you ever hire us.