Field notes & essays.
Working notes, lessons, and the occasional opinion — from building websites, software, and AI systems for real businesses.
The full archive.
Every post, in chronological order.
Client Onboarding Portal: Build vs Buy for Service Businesses
When HoneyBook or Dubsado is enough, when a custom onboarding portal pays back, and what a tailored portal actually includes for service businesses.
Website Form Design Best Practices: Fewer Fields, More Leads
A practical guide to web form design for small businesses: cut fields, write better errors, use autocomplete, and turn more visitors into qualified leads.
Technical SEO Audit Checklist for Small Business Websites
A practical technical SEO audit checklist for small business sites. Covers crawlability, indexability, sitemaps, robots.txt, redirects, canonicals, and log file basics.
Local SEO for Service Businesses: How to Rank in Your Service Area
A practical local SEO guide for service businesses. Rank in your service area with Google Business Profile, location pages, citations, schema, and reviews.
SEO-Friendly Website Redesign Checklist for Small Businesses
A practical website redesign checklist for small businesses that need a better site without losing rankings, leads, or the pages that already work.
Custom Client Portal for Service Businesses: What to Build Before You Buy Software
A practical guide for service businesses deciding whether they need a custom client portal, an off-the-shelf portal, or a simpler client workflow first.
AI Automation Workflows for Service Businesses: What to Automate First
A practical guide to choosing the first AI automation workflows for a service business, with examples for leads, follow-up, reviews, quoting, and admin.
Core Web Vitals in 2026: Page Speed Strategies That Move Rankings
What Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS) mean in 2026, why Google uses them as a ranking signal, and the page speed fixes that actually move small business rankings.
Schema Markup for Small Business Websites: A Practical Guide
A practical guide to schema markup for small business websites. Which schema types matter most, how to implement structured data, and how to test it.