A children''s picture book with a website, which is a smaller brief than most of what is on this wall and a good example of not over-building. There is no shop on it. The book sells where books sell, and the site''s whole job is to be the place a parent or a bookseller lands and finds what they need without waiting.

Every page is a flat HTML file

The site serves plain, pre-written HTML straight off disk. PHP never starts up for a normal visit ... the web server finds the file and hands it over, and there is no database behind any of it. It is about as fast as a website gets, and there is nothing to keep patched.

Except the one part that has to be live

The catch with serving a page that was written earlier is the newsletter form. Sign-up forms carry a per-visitor security token, and a page baked to disk bakes that token in with it ... so either the form breaks for everybody, or you give up the speed.

So the newsletter block is the one region on the page that is fetched fresh on every load, while everything around it stays static. The form gets a real token and a real timestamp per visitor, and the rest of the page never stops being a file. Spam is handled by three layers behind that, and none of them is a puzzle a parent has to solve.

Twenty-one days

Scaffolded and finished inside three weeks, no migration, nothing to import. Roughly 2,300 lines written by hand across templates, blueprints and tests. It is a small site, built small on purpose, and it will keep working without anybody thinking about it.

Visit live site