Rebuilding mode40.com as one marketer

The hard part was keeping lots of small design choices consistent.

Pages that kept coming back different

Every new page I asked for came back slightly different. A little more padding here. A slightly different font size there. I kept correcting the same things by hand.

That's a tax. It doesn't scale past a few pages, and this site has dozens.

A fixed list of design choices

I stopped giving instructions about spacing and started giving the tools a fixed set of choices. Text, spacing, corners, buttons, and widths come from a short list, not hand-typed numbers. I measured that list from a site I admire.

If something looks wrong, I fix the list, not the page. One change then lands everywhere at once.

Screenshots, editing, and checks

• Real product shotsEvery screenshot sits in the same tinted panel and app window, with small illustrated cards floating over it. Sometimes the screenshot is the star. Sometimes the illustration is.
• Pages anyone can editThe site is built so a teammate with no technical background can update it. Plain labels, the choice first, and only the fields that choice needs. No code in a text box.
• A check that runs by itselfBefore a change is saved, an automated check flags new hard-coded numbers. Another one loads the live pages and measures them.
• A human lookI still open the page in a browser before I call it done.