Out of the system
The site was to be rebuilt from scratch, without a CMS, so it no longer depended on a supplier for an opening hour to be changed.
Work
One delivered project, reported in full – including what was difficult and what was actually measured afterwards.
Formal menswear · Odengatan, Stockholm
House of Steens
A family business since 1932. Tailcoats, dinner suits and uniforms, both for hire and for sale, with their own tailors on the premises. Customers come for formal occasions and for things that have to fit properly.
They had a website in a CMS bought from a supplier years earlier. It worked, but every change required a ticket, and nobody at the company could say which domains they actually owned.
The brief
Three things to solve
Two languages
They dress the Nobel banquet, embassy dinners and the Swedish officer corps. Yet there was not a single page in English. The site had to work equally well in both languages, with correct language markup so Google serves the right version.
Domains brought home
Several domains sat with the old supplier. They were to be moved into the company's own name – and the email ran on those same domains.
The hard part
Email was the risk, not the website
Building a website is craft but rarely risky. What can genuinely go wrong is DNS. The shop's invoicing address ran on one of the domains. Had the name servers been switched before every record was copied, invoices would have stopped arriving with nobody noticing until customers called to ask.
So it was done differently: the entire old zone was documented record by record. MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC were carried across unchanged and checked against the original before anything was switched. Only then was the web pointed across. Afterwards every record was verified against several independent resolvers – the local one can serve stale data long after a change has propagated, which is exactly how you fool yourself into thinking the job is done.
The result was that email worked throughout the move. Nobody at the company had to touch their mail, and nobody noticed anything had happened.
0.14 s
Response time, measured
26 kB
Home page HTML
0
Minutes of email downtime
SEK 0
Monthly hosting cost
The figures are measured on the published site, not estimated. Measure them yourself – the address is above.
Before and after
Most of it is invisible to a visitor
The figures for the old site come from the Internet Archive, which saved it 411 times since 2019. They can be checked there. The measurements for the new one are taken straight from the source code.
0 → 11
Pages in English
0 → 29
Redirects from old addresses
2 → 0
External scripts tracking visitors
0 → 11
Image descriptions for screen readers
The site is 22 pages, 11 of them in English, and all the code across the whole site weighs 44 kB. Structured data and canonical tags did not exist at all before.
What nobody knew
Three faults that cost business
This is what an assignment actually consists of. Not choosing typefaces – finding the things that cost the client business every week without anyone noticing.
The map was 274 metres off
The marker sat on the wrong side of the block, and the same wrong coordinates were in the data Google reads for its maps. The fault existed in two places – including for people who never visited the site and only saw the search result. Corrected against the official address register.
The wrong garment on the priciest page
Under the heading ”Tailcoat – from SEK 8,998” sat a photo of an ordinary dark blazer with a yellow shirt. Customers clicking the shop's most expensive garment saw something entirely different from what they were buying.
Wrong descriptions for the visually impaired
Six image descriptions read ”jackets on a brass rail against a wine-red wall”. The image showed a wooden rack against a white wall. Anyone using a screen reader heard a description of something that did not exist.
The faults were found by going through every page in both languages: that links lead somewhere, that images load, that the map coordinates match reality, and that the page works with a keyboard and a screen reader. Seven faults in total were corrected in the final check.
Honest about the scale
This is one project, not a portfolio
I have delivered one site so far. Pretending otherwise would be a poor way to begin a working relationship that rests on you being able to trust what I tell you about your DNS.
And to say it plainly: the shop is owned by a member of my family, and I did not charge for the work. I built it to have something real to show rather than invented examples. That does not make the work any less real – but you should hear it from me and not from somebody else.
So what you can judge is what is live: how the site loads, how it behaves on a phone, how it looks in Google and how it reads to a screen reader. The figures above are measured on the published site, and all of it can be checked without asking me. That is the judgement I want – not one based on who paid the invoice.
Want the same thing?
Tell me what you have today and I will say what it takes and what it costs – before you have to commit to anything.