Guides
Field notes from systems that are actually running.
Every guide here exists because something broke on a running system, or because the obvious answer turned out to be wrong. The write-up is the one that was missing when it was needed.
27 guides · Written from the work · No sponsored toolsGet the checklist
The latest
The newest guides.
Website redesign SEO comes down to where every old address goes A website redesign SEO checklist for owners about to rebuild their site. List every address that earns traffic, give each a new home, forward it permanently and watch Search Console after launch, with the three 404s my own relaunch missed. Read the guide Website redesign cost depends on what the quote includes, not how many pages you have What drives the cost of a website redesign, why quotes for the same site differ by ten times, what BespokeForge's base prices buy at each tier, and five questions to put to every bidder so you can see what each quote leaves out. Read the guide The European Accessibility Act covers your website when consumers can buy through it Who the European Accessibility Act covers (websites and apps where consumers buy, book or subscribe, since 28 June 2025, sellers outside the EU included), who is exempt, what it asks of a site (WCAG level AA and an accessibility statement), how Germany, the Netherlands and Ireland enforce it, and one test to run on your own site. Read the guide
Every guide
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Web presence A website brief stops a new site drifting towards the averageWhat goes into a website brief that holds: who the site is for, what they must feel and be able to check, and what it must never look like. How I briefed my own studio's rebuild before any design, and a template you can copy. 8 min read Web presence You need a cookie banner only for storage your site does not strictly needWhen UK and EU law asks for a cookie banner and when it does not, what changed for analytics in the UK in February 2026, how this site counts visitors without storing anything in the browser, and one test to run on your own site. 8 min read Web presence Rebuilding my own studio’s website: what I had, what I wanted, and what brokeHow I rebuilt bespokeforgestudio.com in ten days: a logo from Canva, every page from Claude Design, the code in Claude Code, and what broke on the way. 29 min read Infrastructure In a fleet of identical sites, a fix spreads as fast as a faultOne page builder update took down every site in a network of local sites at once, while every server stayed healthy. Three episodes from running that fleet, and why reuse and blast radius turned out to be one property. 9 min read Automation Your enquiry forms can lose real leads while every log looks healthyA number field stripped the leading zero from every real mobile number, a calculator's consent check refused every quote request, and a routine switch would have dropped 58% of submissions. Nothing errored. Each fault showed only when what was sent was compared with what arrived. 11 min read Web presence If your title only exists after JavaScript runs, most bots never see itA React site that writes its own titles in the browser is invisible to any reader that does not run it. The fix is a server that writes the head first, and a check that measures what it sends. 14 min read Data A CMS should not be able to lose a page, and mine did twiceLampstand's pages lived in flat JSON files with no drafts, history or locking, and content was destroyed twice. A form even erased fields it never displayed. Moving to a validated documents table with merge-only saves made losing a page structurally impossible. 15 min read Infrastructure Your homepage is running code for pages it cannot showA JavaScript site can feel slow on a phone with nothing heavy in sight, because each page parses and runs code meant for other pages. Four passes on Lampstand took the page from about 480 KB to 250 KB, with nothing on screen changed. 13 min read Automation Your contact form says thank you before anyone has heardA contact form can save every enquiry, send every notification and thank every visitor while nobody on the team hears a thing. Lampstand's did. Here is why success looked identical to failure, and the ten-minute test that exposes it. 11 min read Operations Is your website running pirated plugins? How to checkNulled plugins have the licence check removed, which also removes the security updates. Why it happens, four ways to check without being technical, and what to do if you find one. 5 min read Operations How much should website maintenance cost?Almost nobody is paying the wrong amount. They are paying a fair price for a service they misunderstood. The real market bands, six questions to audit what you already buy, and the arithmetic that settles it. 5 min read Operations Your site is slow. Is it the host, the build, or the plugins?Everyone guesses hosting, and hosting is usually not it. A ten-minute diagnostic you can run yourself, what each cause actually costs to fix, and why the dashboard often says everything is fine. 7 min read
Free resource
The production-readiness checklist.
Twenty-seven checks that separate a system you can sleep on from one that pages you at 2am.
The first step
Start with a conversation.
A short conversation first, to work out which of the two routes you are on and whether this is a problem BespokeForge can solve. The audit is the paid step that follows, and what it produces is yours whether or not anything comes after it.