Rebuilding our website
A record of rebuilding a company site that had only a phone number as its way in, working alongside AI. More of it is about what we had to fix than about what went well.
- Rebuilding our website (1): the phone was the only way inWe rebuilt the company website. Why did we decide to start again? There were three reasons, and none of them were about what suited us — they were all about what made things hard for our customers.
- Rebuilding our website (2): building it alongside an AIWe built this site in conversation with an AI. What we handed over, what we did not. And the part that mattered most was deleting the plausible-sounding falsehoods the AI wrote.
- Rebuilding our website (3): cut, cut, and cut againWe had a finished home page, and then cut it down to two thirds. What there was too much of was not information — it was the same point repeated. Here are the numbers we measured.
- Rebuilding our website (4): what is still unfinishedAt launch there are parts of this site that are still not filled in. Here, without hiding any of it, is what is missing.
- Rebuilding our website (5): on a phone, it was a messAfter launch we opened the site on our own iPhone. The bottom of every page was hidden, and once you had scrolled down there was no way back to the menu. Here is how we turned "somehow it looks wrong" into numbers, and what we fixed.
- Rebuilding our website (6): for two and a half years, the internet thought we were in ShibuyaWe set up Google Search Console. In the process we found that our 2024 move to Katsushika was reflected nowhere online — and that even our own site had an address that did not match the company register.
- Rebuilding our website (7): on an iPad, this time it was the "steps"The phone was fixed. What about the iPad? Opening it, everything — type, spacing — was "medium", with no point of emphasis anywhere. Here is how we removed nine breakpoint steps, made headings bigger and the supporting text smaller, and stopped Japanese from breaking mid-word.