Ship a website
From an empty repo to a fast, live, indexed .com that takes payments.
15 skills · 80 steps in total
- 01Plan a first sitemapThe 4-7 pages your first website needs, so every CTA and success metric has a page.Purpose:: List the pages of the first website.
- 02Pick an inspiration websiteLock one famous, live product site whose structure your first website will follow.Purpose:: Lock the main inspiration URL: the live site your first website follows in structure and craft.
- 03Prove the fit in one sentenceSay why this project is a perfect fit for you, with evidence of what you already have.Purpose:: Say in one concrete sentence why this project is a perfect fit for you.
- 04Build the best alternative frontendTake the best part of each direct competitor plus what visitors in the space expect, and build it better.Purpose:: Build the perfect alternative to your direct competitors: their best parts plus what visitors in this space are used to.
- 05Apply a brand to a built siteSwap colors, fonts, logos and images to your brand without moving a single block.Purpose:: Put your brand onto a built frontend without moving anything.
- 06Make the site actually workWire login, payments, the core feature and every link, without touching the design.Purpose:: What you promised and what competitors basically offer all works, on the design as it is.
- 07Add Google sign-inOne OAuth client per project, redirect URIs for live and local, secrets only in env.Purpose:: Visitors sign in with Google on the project, live and local.
- 08Add payments with your own checkoutA free plan plus paid tiers, paid on your own page with Stripe Elements, never a hosted checkout.Purpose:: Visitors start free and can upgrade to a paid plan on your own checkout page.
- 09Serve images from a CDNCompressed WebP copies on a CDN, originals kept, your app server serves zero image bytes.Purpose:: Project images load fast and cheap from a CDN; the app server serves zero image bytes.
- 10Quality control a siteTurn your design standards into one checklist and check every public page, desktop and mobile.Purpose:: Before you optimise, every standard is present on every public page.
- 11Connect a custom domainPoint your .com at your host and your images subdomain at your CDN, both on https.Purpose:: The project serves on its own .com: site on the host, images on the CDN, both https.
- 12Write account emails in your brand voiceSix account emails and a sender that speak in your narrative's voice: short, in character, never one-note.Purpose:: The six account emails, and who sends them, speak in the voice of your narrative.
- 13Get every page to 90+ on PageSpeedMeasure, fix only what the report blames, and repeat up to three rounds.Purpose:: Every public page scores 90+ on PageSpeed, mobile and desktop.
- 14Set up Search Console and GA4Verify the domain, submit the sitemap and add a GA4 stream, all by API.Purpose:: Google can find, index and measure the site.
- 15Ship a clean sitemapOnly real public pages, every URL 200, self-canonical, with a unique title and description.Purpose:: https://<domain>/sitemap.xml is clean and every page in it is ready to rank.