Advanced

One page, one job. Working out the single action you want a visitor to take, before a word is written, is what separates a site that produces enquiries from a brochure nobody reads.

Choosing and registering a domain, what a fair price is, which of the upsells at checkout are worth taking, and which are pure margin.

Why an address at your own domain matters more than the site design, the difference between forwarding and a real mailbox, and how to set one up without breaking the other.

Squarespace, Wix, WordPress, Shopify, Framer, or code. What each is genuinely good at, what each costs over three years, and how to tell which one your situation actually calls for.

Home, services, about, contact, and the one most people miss. What each page has to accomplish and the order to build them in.

The hardest part of the whole project, and the part no tool does for you. How to write a headline that says something, what to cut, and how to stop sounding like everyone else.

Where to get pictures you are legally allowed to use, how to size and compress them so they do not make the site slow, and why the photo of your actual premises beats the stock shot every time.

Why homemade sites look homemade, and the small number of rules — one typeface, few colours, consistent spacing, generous whitespace — that fix most of it.

Sitting down and doing it: the order of operations, what to get right first, and the traps that cost an afternoon each.

Getting a form that works, making sure it lands somewhere you read, keeping spam out, and — most importantly — making sure a failed send never silently loses somebody's message.

What accessibility actually requires, why it matters legally and commercially, and how to test yours with free tools in about twenty minutes.

What makes a site slow (it is almost always images), how to measure it properly, and what a good score is worth chasing versus where to stop.

The search work that genuinely moves the needle for a local business, in order of return: Google Business Profile, page titles, real content. And the expensive things that do not.

The privacy policy you need and what it has to say under PIPEDA, when cookies oblige you to ask permission, and the anti-spam rules that apply the moment you email anyone.

The checklist to run before you point the domain at it, in order, including the ones people only discover they missed after going live.

What to check, what to ignore, how to make changes without breaking things, and the signals that tell you it is time to get help.

Products, services, bookings and deposits behave completely differently once money is involved. Naming which one you have is the decision every later choice depends on.

A payment link, a hosted checkout, your builder's own store, or a full shopping cart. What each costs, what each can and cannot do, and how to avoid building a store when two payment links would have done.

Business details, the bank account, your payout schedule, and the statement descriptor your customers will see on their card bill — the one nobody sets and everybody gets charged back over.

Modelling what you sell so it stays workable: one-time versus subscription, how to handle variations, and why a price should never be edited in place.

Wiring the checkout into each kind of site, what the customer should see at each step, and the confirmation page that does more work than any other page you will build.

Taking money for time rather than things: holding a slot, charging a deposit against a larger job, and the cancellation terms that make it survivable.

GST, HST and PST, the $30,000 threshold and what happens when you cross it, when you must charge based on where your customer is, and how to let the software work it out.

What has to reach the customer after they pay, writing a refund policy you can live with, and what actually happens when someone disputes a charge — including what evidence wins.

Test mode, the card numbers that simulate every failure worth knowing about, and the single real transaction you should always run before you tell anyone the shop is open.

Fulfilment: the email, the delivery, the record you keep. Getting this wrong is what turns one sale into an hour of correspondence.

The checklist specific to money — the things that are merely embarrassing on a brochure site and expensive on a shop.

The real signals, and the false ones. Most people who think they need custom code do not, and this chapter is written to talk you out of it if that is the honest answer.

Next.js, React, Tailwind and Vercel: what each piece does, why they are chosen together, and what you would be giving up by picking differently.

Node, an editor, and the eight terminal commands that are genuinely all you need. Written for someone who has never opened a terminal.

Version control as a safety net rather than a discipline: how to save your work, how to undo a bad afternoon, and how to never lose the thing you had working yesterday.

From an empty folder to something running in your browser, then to something on the internet, in one sitting.

Routes, components, and content. Structuring a project so that in six months you can still find the thing you want to change.

Getting it online, attaching your domain, and the mail records people destroy in the process. This chapter is worth the price of the tier on its own if you have email at your domain.

What must never be committed, how to tell whether a key is safe in the browser, and what to do the moment you realise one has leaked.

SPF, DKIM and DMARC in plain language, why you should send from a subdomain, and the reasons your mail lands in spam.

How to tell you have reached the point, then tables, queries, and the row-level security rules that stop one customer reading another's data.

Authentication with something that already exists, why writing your own is a serious mistake, and the difference between who someone is and what they are allowed to do.

What it genuinely accelerates, the categories of thing it gets confidently wrong, and how to review code you did not write and do not fully understand yet.

The same goals as the Foundation guide, but at the level where you control every decision — images, fonts, what runs in the browser, and what should not.

Finding out from your own monitoring rather than from a customer. Logs, errors, uptime, and what is worth being woken up for.

Dependency updates, backups, and what to do when a deploy fails — including why redeploying the same code never fixes a build error.

The work that is genuinely worth paying for even once you can do most of it yourself, and how to buy it well.