# Under the Hood: This Site

By David Skelton - 2026-07-30 - https://skeltonmedia.com/blog/under-the-hood-this-site.html

You're reading the artifact, so this one can be concrete. This site replaced my Squarespace and was built in a day of iteration between me and my OS. Here's the actual loop.

## The direction

I started with a feeling, not a spec: my old portfolio said *designer*; nothing about it said *operator*. The direction we landed on, "editorial terminal," makes the OS itself the visual language: a manifest block beside the hero, run-log entries as content, a live status strip. My brand tokens, but the system's voice.

![A directory listing of markdown post files with dated filenames](assets/os/site-content.webp "There is no CMS. Every post is one markdown file with frontmatter, and the build renders whatever is approved.")

## Iterations, honestly listed

- **One page → pages.** My own review caught it: reading felt like infinite scroll. We broke posts into real pages with category shelves, back arrows, and prev/next, then gave every page canonical URLs, structured data, and a sitemap, because a blog that replaces a website has to earn search traffic.

![A redirects file mapping old work URLs to new blog post URLs](assets/os/site-redirects.webp "Every old Squarespace URL still resolves. The case studies moved; the links people already had did not break.")
- **The fonts escaped the site.** I liked the type so much I made it official everywhere. The OS swapped the tokens across 27 internal dashboards the same afternoon.
- **Accessibility beat the brand color.** When I said dark mode had to pass ADA basics, we didn't eyeball it. We computed contrast ratios. My orange failed on cream at small sizes: 3.3:1 against a 4.5:1 requirement. The fix wasn't abandoning the orange; it was a second token: a deeper orange for small text, the pure brand for bars and big display. Dark mode already passed. Now both do, by arithmetic.
- **Drafts can't ship.** The build excludes any post I haven't approved and prints what it skipped. The governance rule isn't in a style guide; it's in the compiler.

![Python function names from the site test suite covering drafts, metadata, and security headers](assets/os/site-gate.webp "The gate that enforces it. Drafts, metadata, og images, sitemap parity, security headers, a secrets sweep. Any failure stops the ship.")

## The part clients should care about

At no point did I type "make me a website" and accept what came back. Every loop was: I name a constraint or a discomfort, the system proposes and *measures*, I judge. The measuring is what makes AI collaboration professional instead of lucky: contrast ratios instead of "looks fine," verified claims instead of confident copy, a draft gate instead of good intentions.

That's the service, whether the deliverable is a brand system or a production pipeline: taste plus governance, at AI speed.