What you have to do
Your project has an address, and it tells you what it needs from you.
In an average week of a project: approve one thing and answer one question. The portal tells you which. When there’s nothing, it says that too.
11stages · the same list the portal shows
The four questions
Anyone with a project running asks the same four, in the same order.
The screen answers them in that order, and the second one sits at the top even when the answer is nothing.
- 01
Question 1
Where is my project?
Which of the 11 stages it’s at — the same list the portal shows.
sample project · stage 4 of 11
- 02
Question 2
What do I have to do?
Knowing that nothing is waiting on you is information. It’s the difference between closing the tab and writing an email to ask.
sample project · nothing waiting
- 03
Question 3
What have you done?
What happened, dated, in plain words.
sample project · 3 stages done
- 04
Question 4
What’s next?
One line, in plain words. On the sample project it reads “Next we build it.”
sample project · 7 stages to go
Approvals
Approval is attached to a version.
When you approve something, you approve a specific version, and that version can’t change afterwards. Approvals attached to “the design” are how two people end up remembering different things in month three, both honestly.
Without JavaScript
It works with JavaScript off.
Not a party trick. It’s a corporate network with an old browser policy, a phone on a bad connection, a blocker that ate a script. The portal works without any of it, and there’s a test that fails the moment that stops being true.
G05 · tested
Before anything starts
What we need from you, and when.
Projects rarely slip on the build. They slip because the copy and the photos didn’t arrive. So the list of what we need, and the date we need it by, is written into the proposal before anything starts, and it’s on the first screen you see when you log in.
Before anything is designed
Research first, then a direction, then code.
- 01
First
Research
Before anything is designed we read your site, open your photos one at a time, read your reviews, and run your three closest competitors through the same 14 checks. The headline comes out of your own sentences.
14 checks · three competitors
- 02
Then
One written sentence
Then the whole project gets one written sentence saying what makes this site different. If we can’t write that sentence, we don’t start.
no sentence · no start
- 03
Then
The test it has to pass
The test it has to pass is blunt: if the screen could belong to any other business with the logo swapped, it failed, and it gets done again.
logo swapped · done again
Who you deal with
The person doing the work.
Not an account manager relaying to a builder, and not a different name every month.
We can’t give you a reference yet.
Start with the audit.
The portal you’ve just read about is built and tested. The audit is where a project with you starts.