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A developer reviewing a pull-request diff and a staging-deploy preview at a tidy two-monitor workstation
Web Development Test-Driven Delivery

How We Build & Maintain Our Website

A test-driven process with automated quality gates, dual CI pipelines, and full version control. Every change is tested, reviewed on a live preview, and approved before it reaches production.

Our Teams

Three dedicated teams, backed by automated gates and AI-assisted review, keep our website running, current, and effective.

Development Team

Builds and maintains the codebase test-first, handles deployments to Netlify, and manages infrastructure. AI-assisted review agents help catch security, performance, and quality issues before every release.

Website Team

Manages content, sets design direction, and conducts UX reviews. Every change is checked on a live dev-environment deploy, with its own database, before sign-off.

Marketing Team

Drives SEO strategy, reviews analytics in Plausible.io, plans content campaigns, and ensures brand consistency across every page and update.

Our Methodology

A repeatable, gated pipeline that keeps every change tested, reviewed, and accountable from first request to production release.

1

Discover

Gather requirements, triage tickets in Syncro, and open a tracked change-management issue with scope and an effort estimate before any code is written.

2

Build, Test-First

Write a failing test first, then the minimal code to pass it, on a branch cut from our integration branch. AI-assisted agents review as we go.

3

Validate

Every change runs automated quality gates on two independent CI pipelines: linting, roughly 2,000 tests, HTML validation, and public-exposure checks.

4

Review & Approve

Merging to the integration branch publishes a live preview on a separate database. Stakeholders sign off, and any schema change is proven there before production.

5

Ship & Safeguard

Approved changes deploy to production as a tagged, versioned release with a changelog. Any version can be rolled back instantly.

A developer watching an automated test suite and continuous-integration pipeline complete with all checks green

Automated Quality Gates

Nothing merges with a failing check. Every change is validated automatically, so regressions are caught long before a human ever reviews the change.

The same gates run on two independent CI pipelines, a cloud runner (GitLab CI) and a self-hosted on-prem runner (Gitea Actions), so a single outage never blocks a release.

  • Roughly 2,000 automated tests on every change
  • Linting, formatting, and HTML validation enforced
  • Public-exposure guards keep internal paths private
  • Dual CI: cloud plus on-prem redundancy

Safe Changes,
Real Review

No change goes live without a real review. Merging to our integration branch publishes a live preview deploy backed by a separate Neon database branch, an exact environment to inspect before anything reaches production.

Schema and data changes are proven on that dev database first, so production is never the place we find a problem. Only after stakeholder sign-off does a change merge to the live site.

  • Live preview on a real dev environment
  • A separate copy-on-write database branch for safe schema changes
  • Stakeholder sign-off required before production
  • Nothing reaches the live site unreviewed
A staging site preview reviewed beside a copy-on-write database branch before changes reach production
A merge request and full commit history under review before a change reaches production

Built for
Accountability

Every change is tracked through version control with full commit history and merge-request review, mirrored to an on-prem backup so the history never lives in one place alone.

Alongside the code, a change-management issue records the scope, estimate, and actual time for every piece of work. Releases are tagged and versioned, so we can roll back to any prior version instantly.

  • Merge-request review on every change
  • Mirrored to an on-prem Gitea backup
  • Change-management issues with time tracking
  • Instant rollback to any tagged, versioned release

AI-Assisted Development

Modern tooling, human accountability. We use AI assistants as a force multiplier for review and delivery, never a replacement for a person signing off.

Security Review

An AI security agent reviews changes touching auth, headers, or serverless functions for common vulnerabilities before we open a merge request.

Performance & Quality

Dedicated agents audit performance budgets, accessibility, and code quality, so regressions surface in review rather than in production.

Content & Strategy

Marketing and content agents keep copy on-brand and SEO-sound, with a person approving every word before it ships.

Every AI suggestion is reviewed by a person and passes the same automated gates as any other change. The efficiency is ours; the accountability stays human.

Our Technology Stack

Purpose-built tools that keep our site fast, secure, and easy to maintain.

Netlify

Global CDN hosting with automatic SSL, serverless Functions, Blobs storage, Identity auth, and a deploy preview for every branch.

GitLab

Primary version control and CI. Merge-request workflows, code review, and a complete audit trail of every change to the codebase.

Gitea

Self-hosted on-prem mirror with a backup CI runner and our change-management issue tracker. Redundancy for both code and process.

Neon PostgreSQL

Serverless Postgres with separate production and dev database branches, so schema changes are proven safely before they touch production.

Drizzle ORM

Type-safe database schema and migrations, validated on the dev branch before they ever reach production data.

Vitest

Roughly 2,000 automated tests run on every change, following a test-first (TDD) discipline for new features and fixes.

AI-Assisted Development

Claude Code review agents for security, performance, and content, accelerating delivery while every change still passes human review.

Tailwind CSS

Utility-first CSS compiled at build time for clean, responsive, maintainable design and optimal file size.

Plausible.io

Privacy-friendly, cookieless analytics. Page views, engagement, and conversions without compromising visitor privacy.

The Same Rigor for IT Documentation

The Git version control and structured methodology we use for web development is the same approach we apply to all IT documentation. Every configuration change is tracked, reviewed, and auditable.

See Our Documentation Process →

Want to See How We Can Help Your Business?

We bring the same level of structure, accountability, and transparency to every IT project. Let us show you what a professional approach looks like.

Contact Us for a Complimentary Consultation