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Notes from our client work: cleaning up hacked WordPress sites, speeding up slow WooCommerce stores, and deciding when a custom application should replace the spreadsheet. Written for business owners who run a website without a developer on staff.
Sooner or later every business application has to produce a document. A quote the customer can forward to their boss, an invoice that accounting will accept, a report the board reads on a tablet, a certificate that has to look official. The first version is usually the browser’s print dialog pointed at a web page, and it’s fine until a
Most businesses we talk to don’t need a new AI product. They have an application already, a customer portal or an ops system or a booking tool, and they’ve been asked by a board member or a customer whether it “uses AI”. The honest answer is usually no, and the useful question is whether it should, and where. There are
Internal tools are the software nobody outside the business ever sees: the screen the ops team uses to approve refunds, the dashboard the owner looks at on Monday, the form that turns a phone order into a job. They’re also the software most likely to be a spreadsheet, a shared inbox, or a WhatsApp group, because they never get budget.
In most small businesses there’s one person who knows where the website lives, which email address the domain renews to, how the office printer got onto the network, and what to do when the online store stops taking orders. Sometimes that person is a contractor, sometimes it’s the owner’s nephew, and sometimes it’s the owner. The business runs fine until
Every business that quotes custom work has a quoting spreadsheet, and every quoting spreadsheet has a person. The person knows which tab to update when steel goes up, why the labour rate on row 41 is different, and that you have to copy the file rather than open the original because the macros do something odd otherwise. Quotes go out
Someone in sales asks why website enquiries take a day to show up in the CRM, and someone in marketing asks why the CRM has three records for the same person, and the answer to both is the integration that was set up with a Zapier account two years ago and hasn’t been looked at since. Connecting a website to
Most of the AI-built apps we get asked to look at have a Stripe integration in them somewhere, and it is usually the part that got built fastest. Understandably so. Stripe’s documentation is good, the AI tools have all read it, and “add a checkout page” is about the easiest thing you can prompt for. The trouble is that a
Search Console has a report called Core Web Vitals, and every few months it emails a business owner to say some of their pages are “poor”. The owner pastes the URL into PageSpeed Insights, gets a score of 34 in red, and either panics or decides the whole thing is nonsense. Neither reaction is quite right. The three metrics behind
Most of the briefs that reach us are either a single paragraph (“we need an app that does X, how much?”) or a forty-page requirements document that nobody, including the author, has read all the way through. Neither one can be quoted from, and what happens next depends on the developer. Some reply with a number wide enough to cover
There’s a particular kind of business where the website says there are six units of something, the warehouse shelf has four, the accounting system thinks there are nine, and the person who could tell you which is right is on holiday. Orders get taken for stock that isn’t there, purchase orders get raised for stock that is, and once a