Under the hood
How the sites we run actually work.
You never need to read this page to work with us. It is here for the curious, and for anyone who wants to check what we say. Where something runs on only some of our sites, it says which.
One admin behind the sites we run
What happens when an owner opens their admin.
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You open your-site.com/admin
Your own address and your own login. New logins are by invitation, and you pick your own password from the emailed link.
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Your site passes it on
Your browser never reaches our admin directly. Your site relays each request with a secret the admin checks, so a request that did not come through one of our sites is refused.
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One admin for all of them
The same screens for every business on it, so an improvement to the admin reaches you the day we make it.
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Your data stays in your site
The admin reads and writes through your site, with a key that belongs to your site alone. Your customers, inquiries and pages live in your site's own database.
- Every page of a live site over a secure (https) connection
- The keys that connect a site to the admin are stored encrypted and never reach a browser
- Test copies of gs.construction, dawnsellshomes.com, hive.contractors and Deerfield Furniture Mart are hidden from search engines
- Each site is its own application with its own database. Most run on a server we look after, and a site with its own server can stay on it
Where · gs.construction, dawnsellshomes.com, jpeterson-design.com, hive.contractors and this site. Deerfield Furniture Mart joins at launch. waterisprecious.org is not on the admin: its content lives in the site itself.
The daily loop
Every morning, without anyone logging in. Switched on at gs.construction.
Step 1 of 5
Measure
The latest search data for every page: who saw it, who clicked, where it ranked.
Step 2 of 5
Decide
Possible changes are scored by how likely they are to help, and what worked before shapes the scoring.
Step 3 of 5
Apply
Up to 25 small changes a day, only from a short list of safe, reversible kinds. A brand-new page is only drafted; a person decides whether it goes live.
Step 4 of 5
Watch
About three weeks later, each change is checked against that page's own numbers from before it, over four weeks of data.
Step 5 of 5
Keep or undo
What helped stays. A drop is double-checked against real ranking positions, and a change that made things worse is put back on its own.
Then it starts again tomorrow. Click a step, or let it play.
The only kinds of change it makes
- A clearer page title or description
- Asking search engines to look at a page again
- Refreshing the plain-text summary written for AI assistants
- Rewriting a thin introduction on a town page, keeping the old text to put back exactly
- Drafting a new page for a search nobody is answering, for a person to publish
Where · Switched on at gs.construction. At jpeterson-design.com the same morning review suggests changes but applies none. dawnsellshomes.com, hive.contractors and this site keep it off by choice: dawnsellshomes.com's page titles and descriptions are written by its own developer.
Search upkeep
The quieter work that keeps a site findable.
Search data, every night
How each page did in search is brought into the admin every night, as soon as the search engine reports it, which is usually two or three days behind.
Where · gs.construction, dawnsellshomes.com, jpeterson-design.com, hive.contractors
Is Google showing every page?
Pages are checked every night, up to the search engine's daily allowance, so a large site's pages take turns. Any that Google is having trouble with show up in a short list in the admin.
Where · gs.construction, dawnsellshomes.com, jpeterson-design.com, hive.contractors
A library of health reports
Plain-English reports, on a schedule or on request: pages losing clicks, searches with no page, links worth adding, speed by kind of page and more. A report that does not apply to a business says so instead of failing.
Where · On a schedule at gs.construction, dawnsellshomes.com and hive.contractors; run from the admin on request at jpeterson-design.com
A map of every page
Each site keeps a current map of its pages for search engines, generated from its own content, and tells them when a page is added or changed instead of waiting for them to notice.
Where · Maps: every site except waterisprecious.org. Change notices: gs.construction, dawnsellshomes.com, jpeterson-design.com and this site
A description machines can read
Behind the pages, a machine-readable description of the business — hours, location, services, reviews, prices — so a search result can show more than a plain link.
Where · gs.construction, dawnsellshomes.com, jpeterson-design.com, Deerfield Furniture Mart and this site
A summary for AI assistants
A short plain-text summary of the business, so an assistant asked about it describes it accurately.
Where · gs.construction, dawnsellshomes.com, jpeterson-design.com and this site
Photos, reviews and posts
Photos to the right Google listing
Each project photo gets a large copy stamped with the job's date and place, and a caption of up to 250 characters, and goes to the listing for its location. An hourly check makes sure nothing goes up twice or goes missing.
Where · gs.construction; jpeterson-design.com, with a listing each for Chicago, Atlanta and Southwest Michigan
Reviews brought in
Google reviews are brought onto the site per listing from the admin, tagged by location, with duplicates swept out daily. At gs.construction, Google reviews arrive every morning on their own and other review sites' weekly.
Where · gs.construction, jpeterson-design.com
Posts on a schedule
Posts go out from each site's planner on the schedule set for it, with nobody logging in to post them.
Where · gs.construction and jpeterson-design.com. Ready on dawnsellshomes.com, switched off until its accounts are connected
Counting visits without following people
Our own counter records page views, taps to call and email, and errors. The tag it uses to tell visits apart cannot be traced back to a person and changes every day. Our live sites, this one included, also run outside analytics tools that set their own cookies, so we do not promise a cookie-free site.
Where · gs.construction, dawnsellshomes.com, jpeterson-design.com, hive.contractors and this site
When something breaks
Errors in a visitor's browser are grouped per site on a board we check, and server logs sit in one viewer for us. dawnsellshomes.com also checks itself every 10 minutes and emails the team if it is down, slower than 8 seconds, or logging new errors.
Where · gs.construction, dawnsellshomes.com, jpeterson-design.com, hive.contractors and this site
By the numbers
6
sites built: 5 live, 1 in development
25
most small search changes the daily loop makes in a day, at gs.construction
3 weeks
after a change, before it is judged against the page's own numbers
Every 10 min
bank transactions matched to expenses, at hive.contractors
Every hour
saved home searches checked for new matches and price drops, at dawnsellshomes.com
3
Google listings at J. Peterson Design, one per city, each stocked with its own city's project photos
Site by site
More than 1,200 pages in its search map, about 700 of them for the 66 towns it serves, plus a separate map of its photos. A machine-readable description on every page, the daily loop switched on, every inquiry saved before any email is sent, and a map of finished jobs refreshed every night from the company's own job records.
Listings copied from the MLS every hour, with new photos within about ten minutes of each copy. Thousands of town, condo and neighborhood pages whose listings and sale numbers come from the same feed. The monthly-payment search is worked out inside the search itself, so it truly filters. Old links, including the previous search address, lead into the site's own search.
More than 550 pages in its search map, including a page for each project photo and for 273 ZIP codes. Photos are served in three sizes — 640, 1,200 and 2,400 pixels — so a phone downloads a small one. New projects start from photos: titles, descriptions and captions are drafted for the studio to approve.
A public site of 88 pages in each of English, Polish and Spanish. It installs on a phone like an app, with notifications, and recent message threads open with no signal. Receipts and bank transactions are matched every ten minutes, and estimating rules are proposed each night for a person to approve.
Old product links from the previous store will lead to the same listing on the new one, so saved and shared links keep working. Each product carries one machine-readable offer per priced lot. Photos are resized for phones, the store map loads only when a shopper scrolls to it, links start loading while the pointer rests on them, and the copy in development is hidden from search engines.
The site's own script is under 2 KB and its fonts are served from the site itself. A skip-to-content link, questions that open from the keyboard, and a photo viewer that works with the arrow keys and Escape. The depth gauge shows only on screens 1,280 pixels and wider. It is not connected to our admin; its content lives in the site itself.
Have a business that needs a website run properly?
We take on a small number of sites: ones we design, build and look after, with the people who built them a message away.
You will reach Patryk Szady and Joshua Simmons directly.