Choosing a stack for your first product
The stack matters far less than the team that maintains it. Here is how we actually decide.
The design fee is the small number. Content, migration and QA are where budgets go.
Every redesign quote has a visible number and an invisible one. The visible number is design and build. The invisible one is content: rewriting pages, re-shooting photography, and deciding what to delete.
We ask clients to run a content inventory before we quote. Half the pages on an old site usually have no traffic and no owner. Deleting them is free and makes everything after it cheaper.
Migration and QA are the other half. Redirects, metadata, and analytics continuity are not glamorous, but skipping them is how a redesign loses a year of search rankings in a week.
The stack matters far less than the team that maintains it. Here is how we actually decide.
Three metrics, a handful of fixes, and the ones that are rarely worth chasing.