01
Step 1
Make the change
Content or layout edit, committed with a record of what changed and why.
Case Study
Kaffa Espresso Bar — Live Client Site
Kaffa Espresso Bar · Coffee Shop website
Live
A neighborhood espresso bar's first real web presence — fast, brand-accurate, and handed off so the shop can run it themselves.
Overview
Project framing
A neighborhood espresso bar with no web presence and no in-house technical capacity. The job was a real site, a real domain, and a way for the owner to keep it running without ever opening a terminal. Boring, durable choices throughout.
Problem
Most small-business sites are either over-built — a storefront platform with booking add-ons for a shop with nothing to sell online — or under-built, a template that goes stale the day after launch. For a coffee shop that needs to show hours, location and menu, and that does not want a monthly platform fee, the right answer is something small and fast that belongs to the shop.
Role
Designer, engineer, operator. One-month build, single client, hand-off-ready.
Why now
Web standards are good enough now that a hand-built page beats most templates on speed, and secure hosting has become genuinely hands-off. Together those mean a shop can have a real online presence without paying a platform tax or hiring anyone to babysit it.
Topline
Constraints
- No in-house technical capacity at the shop — everything had to be operable by the client or trivially handed off.
- The previous address lived inside another artist's site, with email and outside services still pointed at it — the move had to be surgical.
Outcomes
- The shop's first real online presence — a branded site at its own domain, and the primary way customers find its hours, menu, and location.
- Stays current without a developer: the shop updates it themselves, with no downtime and nothing going stale after launch.
- Handed off so the shop can keep the site running without a developer.
Architecture
Edit → live
02
Step 2
Publish
One action publishes it. No manual steps, nothing to remember.
Key Decisions
Struggles
The shop's previous address lived inside another artist's site, and moving to their own .com had to happen without disturbing their email or the outside services still pointed at the old address.
Mapped exactly what depended on the old address before touching anything, moved only what belonged to the website, and kept the old address working throughout the transition. No outage, no broken email, nothing else disturbed.
Learnings
The boring choices are the right ones for client work — they age well and they hand off cleanly.
DNS cutovers fail when they touch records they didn't need to touch. Be surgical.