Stephen Therapy

The problem

Stephen runs a hypnotherapy and careers advice practice in Stockport. His website had been on WordPress for years, built and hosted by someone else, and that person was closing the hosting down at the end of September. The domain, the DNS, the email forwarding and the site itself all lived in an account Stephen could not log into.

On top of the deadline, the site was slow, he could not change his own fees or add an article without asking someone, and a second domain pointed at it that nobody had touched in years.

What I built

A new site on Astro, generated as plain HTML files, so there is no database, no plugins and nothing to patch. Every service from the old site was rebuilt, including four pages that were not in the original plan, at no extra charge, because dropping them would have cost him the search traffic they already had.

His 37 articles came across from the old site with their images. A simple editor sits behind a login, so he changes his fees, reviews, free guides and contact details himself, in a form rather than in code. The service page wording stays with me on purpose, because that is the part that makes a claim.

The contact form sends straight to his inbox and was proven end to end before launch.

The move

This was the part with the deadline on it. The domain was registered in one place, the DNS was hosted in another, and the email forwarding sat on the hosting that was about to disappear.

Both domains were moved onto Cloudflare, with the DNS rebuilt record by record. Email routing was set up so mail to his info address still reaches his inbox, tested before the switch rather than after. The second domain now redirects to the right page on the new site. Old page addresses redirect to their replacements, so the links he had built up over the years still work.

The site went live on the evening of 16 September, a fortnight before the old hosting closed.

Where he ended up

• A site that loads fast and has nothing to keep updated
• An editor he can use without asking me
• The domain, hosting and email in accounts in his own name
• Running costs down to the price of the domain, about £10 a year
• Visitor stats with no cookie banner, because the tool used does not need one