- I'm sharing more of what I've learned building sites and running a solo studio, one post at a time.

And if you need a website that actually works for your business, I'd love to hear about it. DM me or find me at www.inclinedev.com. Peace! [8/8]

.. on day one. Assets, brand guidelines, conversations — all of it, one place.

Your clients are already juggling a hundred things. Don't make them your filing system.

If any of this resonates, follow along ...

Lesson 3 - I had to ask a client to resend a file.

It was buried in an email chain from 3 weeks prior, one of 10 attachments.

Uncomfortable. Unprofessional. Entirely avoidable.

Now every project gets a Google Drive folder ...

The fix is simple: create Standard Operating Procedures.

Scope the whole project before a single line of code is written. Every step. Every handoff. Every approval.
If you got hit by a bus tomorrow, could your project survive without you?

Lesson 2 - For a while I was delegating work across a 10-hour time zone difference.

No scoped task list. No plan from start to finish. Just me, exhausted, sending Slack messages late at night so work could start on the other side of the world by morning.

...

The lesson: your clients know their business. You know the web. Your job is to bridge that gap with data, not opinions.

Lesson 1 - client lesson, 2011:
A bakery wanted 15 items in their main navigation.
I showed them user research. We cut it to 6, grouped the FAQs, killed the ALL CAPS.
Result: fewer confused customer calls, more traffic, happier customers ...