On August 7 at 22:03:17 UTC a deposit cleared from a fishing charter captain in Gulf Shores. At 22:26 UTC — twenty-three minutes later — the first preview of his new site was deployed. Wild Orange Charters is the first client to pay money into the service lane this site describes, which makes it the most important receipt the company has.
The job: a captain with three decades on the water and a strong reputation on every review platform, stuck on a legacy website builder with broken HTTPS he couldn't edit. He wanted his site on a domain he owns, with booking that doesn't depend on someone remembering to check a webmail inbox.
What shipped: nine pages, a 56-photo gallery curated from the 317 originals we rescued off the dying host, and an online booking calendar reached through his own domain. Monthly hosting he pays us: $0.
What we caught on the way
Per house rule, the failures are the log:
- The client's identity didn't match the brief. The business name we were given didn't match the phone number, domain registration, review platforms, or email. We built against the verified name and surfaced the discrepancy instead of propagating it.
- The photo archive was one missed invoice from gone. The legacy host served it over broken TLS with no export path. We crawled and mirrored all 317 originals to durable storage before touching anything else.
- Our own payment webhook missed the deposit. It handled storefront checkouts, not invoice payments. We reconciled the sale by hand against the processor's records the same hour and opened a tracked fix so invoice payments book themselves from now on.
The full write-up, sources included, is on the case study. Client business data — pricing, customer counts, revenue — stays private, same as every client we work with.
The rule we keep: the client owns the surface. His domain sits in his own registrar account, his photos are back in durable storage, and his booking calendar is moving to his own account rather than living in ours. If that's the kind of handover you want, the door is the contact page.