Field notes

Guides

Practical how-tos and field notes from real engagements, organised by discipline. The thinking and the step-by-step, from systems actually built and operated here. Every guide here exists because something broke on a running system, or because the obvious answer turned out to be wrong, and the write-up is the one that was missing when it was needed.

Is your website running pirated plugins? How to check Nulled 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. 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. 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. Your developer stopped replying. What to do first Almost nothing is actually lost, it just sits in accounts you do not control. The five things to secure today, in order, what not to do, and how to make sure it cannot happen twice. In-house, agency, freelancer, fractional: the honest comparison Four models, what each actually costs, how each one fails, and the three questions that decide between them. Written from having worked inside all four, including the parts that argue against hiring a fractional engineer. When a website should not be a WordPress site WordPress is the right answer for most business sites. The exception is one specific shape of project, and the deciding question is whether the maintenance surface matches how often the thing actually changes. Fractional engineer vs freelancer: what changes when the build ends The freelance model has no answer for one specific moment, and it arrives about a week after launch. What changes with a retainer, when a freelancer is the right hire, and the question to ask before signing. Fractional engineer vs agency: who actually owns your systems An agency is optimised to finish. A fractional engineer is optimised to still be here. Written from four months inside one: how ownership really works, when an agency is the right call, and the question to ask either. A maintenance plan vs a fractional retainer: what you are actually buying Updates and uptime, or someone whose job is that it works. What each product actually covers, what the market charges, and the one question that tells you which you need. Five signs your business has outgrown its web vendor Ticket queues, ownership gaps, humans as middleware, everything-is-a-quote, and departed builders. The five fragments that mean the vendor shape is wrong, not the vendor. What a fractional engineering retainer looks like, month to month Monitoring that never sleeps, a maintenance rhythm, an improvements queue, and a plain-language report. An ordinary retainer month, documented in the order it happens. The freelancer, the agency, and the fractional engineer: who owns your systems after launch? The day after launch, who wakes up caring whether it still works? How ownership plays out across the three models, and the month-seven question that exposes it.
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  2. 02

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