I rebuilt their websites before anyone asked, then sent one email each.

02The constraint

• ×Nobody had asked. No brief, no access, no staging environment, and nothing to work from but the site the public could see.
• ×Everything the old site said belonged to the business, and some of it was the only copy that existed. A rebuild that loses a sentence loses the business's own record of itself.
• ×The owner has to be able to change it. A site the owner cannot edit is a site that dates from the day it shipped.
• ×Every old URL is somebody else's link. Lose one and the traffic behind it goes with it.

03What I built

1. 01Every sentence and every photograph from the old site captured before a line of the new one was written.
2. 02A build-failing script that walks all 105 of a client's original sentences and stops the build if one goes missing.
3. 03103 photographs archived at the best resolution the old host would serve — 46 of them reachable only through JavaScript carousels, extracted out of the widget bundles.
4. 04An editor the owner actually uses: click a sentence on the live page, change it, publish. One commit. No CMS, no database, no plugin surface to patch, no subscription.
5. 05A hardened publish flow behind that editor: asserted popup origin, single-use state in an HttpOnly cookie, and a real push-permission check.
6. 06Every old URL redirected and every old anchor kept as a real element id.
7. 07Pre-built AVIF derivatives with a JPEG fallback, and no image CDN in front of any of it.
8. 08A QA sweep across every route at three viewports: overflow, broken images, heading order, alt text, dead links, console errors.
9. 09An adversarial review before delivery.

04Elapsed

Oxygen enrichment, Colorado

2025

General contractor, Glenwood Springs

2026

Commercial janitorial, Denver

2026

Software company, Denver

2026

05What it produced

Nothing any of the old sites said was lost. One of them came out of the rebuild seven years older than it had been telling people.

The Colorado Secretary of State register has that corporation formed on 27 April 1994. Its own site had been publishing a later date for eight years. The rebuild moved it and locked it behind a script, in the client's favour.

On one of these, six independent reviewers filed 32 findings before delivery. 12 survived scrutiny. Every one was fixed.