What we're building, week of October 12

Last week's note said a market report for a trade we'd scanned was built and waiting on my read. It said the report would be this week's story if it held up. I read it. The shape of it was fine. But I wasn't happy with how it would land in someone's inbox. So it's still sitting as a draft while I fix that. The thing that actually took over the week was bigger: how we handle a client asking for a change by email.

Email us a change, get a preview back

If you're on a managed plan with us, you can email me a change. Something small, like a fix to your hours or a different photo on a page. Until this week, every one of those went through me by hand first. You saw nothing until I'd handled it myself. Now, for a small change like that, the work gets built right away. You get an email with a link to look at it before it goes live. You can send another small change after that. It stacks onto the same preview. You're not waiting on a separate reply each time.

A bigger change, like a new page, still waits for me to look at it first. You won't see a preview until I've read it myself. Either way, nothing goes live on your site until I click the button that sends it out. That part hasn't changed. It isn't going to.

What the portal shows about your plan

One client's managed plan doesn't start until next month. But their portal said it had already started, with no upcoming payment listed anywhere. That's confusing if you're trying to track what you owe and when. We fixed it this week. The portal now shows the real start date plainly. A badge says the plan hasn't started yet. A line shows when the first payment is coming and how it'll reach you. If your plan starts the same day your site goes live, you won't notice any of this. If it starts later, you'll see exactly when and what's coming. No more guessing from a page that assumes everything is already running.

A page that shows how the work happens

Our architecture page has a section called See It Run. It's a board you can click through yourself. Start a request. Approve a proposal. Watch a site get built. Send in a change by email. Every path on it stops at a person before anything reaches you. That's true of how the work actually gets done here, not just a line we say. This week we gave that board a coat of paint so it matches the rest of the site. Before, it looked like a separate tool someone bolted on. We also put a short, four-step version on the home page. Now you can get the idea without hunting for the full board.

A fix we owed a client

A church we built a site for has several forms on their website. A contact form, and ones for prayer requests, planning a visit, and membership. Since around the end of September, none of those submissions reached the staff dashboard where the office looks for them. The cause was a setting change on our end. It made the form's connection to our database get rejected every time someone hit submit. The good news: the office and the pastor still got every message by email the whole time. That part of the form never touched the piece that broke. Nothing was lost, but nobody saw a thing show up where they expected to. It's fixed now. I tested it myself with a real submission before telling them it was done.

Our first daily answer, out loud

We also posted our first short video answering a question people actually type into Google and into AI chat tools: how do websites show up in AI search results. It's me, in my own voice, cloned, and labelled clearly as AI-voiced on the video and in the caption. The plan is one short answer like that most weeks. Each one built around a question a small business owner has genuinely asked, not a sales pitch dressed up as content. It'll stay labelled every time. That's not something I'll skip, even for a video this short.

Next week

I want the email-change feature running for a second client, not just the first one who has it now. And there should be another one of these short answer videos out, as long as the next question clears review the way the first one did.

Written with AI, signed by an engineer.