Before you build.
A few decisions worth making early. A few checks worth doing properly. Use these with your team, whatever you build with.
Compare your options
Prepare a brief, shortlist builders and save a practical build plan.
Map the decisions
Work through dependencies and save the choices behind your project.
Start with a real problem.
Who is this for? What should they be able to do? Pick one useful outcome. Test it with real content before adding more features.
Own what you are building.
Know who controls the domain, hosting, source code and data. Check recurring costs, export options and who will maintain it.
Make access deliberate.
Keep secrets out of the browser. Enforce permissions where data is stored. Test what a signed-out visitor and a different account cannot access.
Test the full conversation.
Submit an enquiry from a phone. Check validation, the draft, actual delivery and the reply path. A button working is only one part of the journey.
Make it usable.
Try the whole site with a keyboard. Check labels, visible focus, contrast, zoom, reduced motion and small screens. Make errors understandable and recoverable.
Keep the page light.
Resize and compress images. Reserve their space. Load video on demand. Measure real pages on a slower connection, not just your fastest device.
Help people find the right page.
Use clear titles, useful copy, canonical URLs and a sitemap. Keep structured data consistent with visible facts. AI discovery needs accessible, accurate content too. No file or schema guarantees a recommendation.
Plan for the day after.
Test a backup restore and a rollback. Assign someone to watch failures, renew the domain and keep dependencies current. Write down how to recover.