What we're building, week of October 19

Last week's note said I wanted the email-change feature running for a second client and another short answer video out. Neither happened. A new client signed on this week and wanted to move fast, and that took over nearly every hour I had. I'll get back to the other two things, but this week's story is the new site.

A whole site, built in about a week

A sign and vehicle wrap company reached out and agreed to the whole project over the phone. They wanted to move quickly, so we did. By the end of the week we had a full site built: pages for every service they offer, plus a page for each town in their area so people searching from Franklin or Murfreesboro find something written for them, not a generic page that mentions them once.

It still goes through our normal steps before anything reaches the public. I read every page. The client still needs to sign off, and their logo and brand colors are coming in soon, so the site you'd see today is a placeholder for those. Nothing goes live until they say go.

A tool that shows your wrap before you order it

The part of this build I'm proudest of is a small tool on the site. A customer picks a color, and the tool shows that color applied to a photo of a real vehicle. That sounds simple. Getting it right wasn't.

The first version colored the whole photo, windows and headlights included, which looked wrong the moment you looked closely. I rebuilt how it finds the metal panels on the car, so now the color only lands where paint actually goes. Glass, lights, and wheels stay untouched. I caught a version that missed the roof and the door tops too, where the color should have wrapped around the shape of the car and didn't. Fixed that before it went anywhere near the client.

It's a small feature on one site, but it's the kind of thing that makes a quote conversation easier. You can show someone what their truck looks like in blue before they commit to anything.

What we fixed for everyone, not just one client

Building a full site in a week from scratch is a good way to find the small things that are slightly wrong everywhere else too. A few of them turned into changes that now apply to every site we run, not just the new one.

Dark and light mode now follow what your phone or computer already prefers, instead of defaulting to one choice no matter what. Links that jump to another page now take you to the top of that page. Before, clicking a link from the bottom of a long page could drop you at the bottom of the next one too, which looks broken even though nothing is. Text contrast on a few sites was too light to read comfortably, especially for anyone with lower vision, and that's been tightened across the board. Pages also load without the layout jumping around as fonts finish loading in, which matters more on a slow phone connection than it does sitting at a desk on fast wifi.

None of these are flashy. They're the kind of thing you don't notice when it's right, and only notice when it's wrong. Now they're written down as standards we build every new site against, not something I have to remember to check by hand each time.

Finishing touches for a roofing client's new look

A roofing company we built a site for has been going through a round of polish on a preview version of their site before anything replaces what's live now. This week that included a shadow effect to make the service cards and review cards feel like they sit above the page instead of flat on it, and a strip of live Google reviews pulled straight from their listing instead of typed in by hand. We also fixed a spot where that shadow had a hard clipped edge inside a scrolling row of reviews, which looked like a mistake instead of a style choice.

None of it is live yet. The client is still looking over the preview, and I'd rather wait for a clear yes than push something half-reviewed.

Next week

I want the new sign company's site live, once the client approves it and their logo and colors are in. I'll also pick back up on the email-change feature for a second client and get another short answer video out, both of which got pushed by this week's build.

Written with AI, signed by an engineer.