Three live sites, three platforms, three different reasons

A licensed Queensland business broking practice, with listings, appraisals, a library of articles, and three pieces of software behind the public pages that were built rather than bought.

The risk here is the words, not the code. Everything on it is a representation somebody holding a licence has to stand behind, and appraisal and valuation are not interchangeable when you do. So the build refuses to deploy rather than publish something wrong: twelve guards run before anything goes out, every page carries the exact commit it was built from, and a check runs every two hours against the live site and raises a ticket the moment what is serving stops matching what was approved.

Three things behind it were built rather than bought. A customer record system that takes every enquiry, tracks it through to settlement and drives the marketing and the business listings off the same records. An appraisal tool that produces a defensible figure from a seller’s own numbers. And a live chat that answers on the site, inside written guardrails, with its own gate in the build so it cannot start saying things the licence does not allow.

A broker’s pipeline is the business. Renting it back from somebody else is how you end up unable to leave, so it sits in the same repository as the site and is deployed by the same pipeline.

An Australian gift guide holding 398 ideas from 42 retailers, browsable by budget, occasion, decade and the age of the person you are buying for.

The hard part is that the facts move. A price read in August is not a price in October, and a site that quotes one is making a claim it cannot support. So every price is read off the live product page, the date is printed on the card, and the build refuses to publish a figure older than ten days without a person signing it off. The structured data sent to Google carries the same window, because telling a search engine a price is good for a month while the site calls it stale is two different answers to one question.

Where a link earns a commission it says so on that product, and where it does not it stays quiet. That distinction is per product rather than per shop, so a retailer with one paid link and eleven unpaid ones is never described as a commercial relationship it is not in.

A Christmas store selling personalised Santa sacks and gifts. The newest of the three and the smallest, which is what a store looks like in its first season.

This one is here because of what was not built. It runs on Shopify. We can write a checkout, and writing one here would have been the wrong call: the store has to take money reliably for about eight weeks a year, and a custom cart is not paid for once, it is paid for every year afterwards in maintenance, card compliance and the week in December when something breaks and there is nobody to ring.

So the work went where it changes the outcome. The product data, the personalisation options, the postage cut-offs that decide whether a present arrives, and the theme. Shopify keeps the parts that are somebody else’s problem and should stay that way.