Case study — personal services
The site was fine. The signals were pointing at nothing.
A one-chair nail studio, taken from no web presence to a live, indexed, security-hardened six-page site — brand system, front-end build, search and security, run as four parallel workstreams over 19 commits.
Verified results
- 64 → 86
Weighted SEO health score across seven categories: content, technical, on-page, schema, performance, AI readiness, images.
- 0 → 3 of 3
Name, address and phone reconciled across the website, the booking platform and the Google Business Profile.
- 282 → 111 KB
Above-the-fold page weight, with 16 iPhone HEIC photos rebuilt into 32 responsive WebP assets at 710 KB total.
- 130 / 0
Links audited on the live origin. Zero broken — and the audit compared each link’s label to its destination, not just its status code.
Every number on this page was verified against the production origin after launch. None of it is a staging estimate.
The brief
One chair, no website, a booking link on Instagram
A solo nail artist with real clients, real demand, and no owned presence. Bookings came through a third-party platform reached from a bio link. Search couldn’t find her, the studio had no identity beyond a phone-camera aesthetic, and there was nothing to point a Google listing at.
Four things had to happen at once, because doing them in sequence would have meant redoing each one: a brand system, a site, a search foundation, and a security and privacy pass on the assets going public.
Sole consultant on all four. Built end to end in Claude Code as the agentic coding environment — programmatic brand-colour extraction, a scripted link-audit rule set, a HEIC-to-WebP image pipeline, EXIF and GPS scrubbing, and production verification, all driven through one workflow.
Workstream 01
Brand system, drawn then proven
The logo and wordmark were designed in Adobe Illustrator. Then the whole design system was built from that mark rather than around it.
- Brand hexes carried into code, then verified by programmatically sampling the artwork — so the tokens are provably the mark’s values, not an eyedropper guess
- The wordmark’s triple-offset shadow abstracted into one reusable CSS custom property, carried across headings, cards, buttons and swatches
- Type paired to the lettering and self-hosted
- Browsing copy rewritten to first person, so the site sounds like the person doing the work
Workstream 02
Search: 70 references pointing at a domain that didn’t exist
The defect that best explains why ForgeBrands sells this work bundled.
Seventy canonical, Open Graph, sitemap, robots and JSON-LD references all resolved to a placeholder domain with no DNS record. Every page returned 200. A conventional link checker passed it clean, because the URLs in the links were fine — it was the URLs in the signals that were wrong.
- Weighted SEO health raised from 64/100 to 86/100 across seven categories
- A 122-reference URL migration (
/services.htmlto/services) timed against crawl state so redirect equity didn’t churn - Five JSON-LD schema blocks — NailSalon, OfferCatalog, FAQPage, AboutPage/Person, breadcrumbs — with geocoded coordinates and prices reconciled against the booking platform
aggregateRatingdeliberately omitted, because there were no verifiable reviews to base it on- The nearest local competitor ranking #1 had zero schema blocks
Workstream 03
Performance and the booking funnel
- Above-the-fold weight cut from 282 KB to 111 KB
- A HEIC-to-WebP pipeline turning 16 iPhone files (12 MB) into 32 responsive assets totalling 710 KB
- The third-party booking widget converted to inline mode, so the booking page works as a funnel instead of bouncing the visitor off-site
- A custom link-audit rule set comparing each link’s label against its destination, run across 130 links — zero broken, and it caught defects a standard checker passed because every URL returned 200
Workstream 04
Security, and 16 photographs with the studio’s address inside them
Client photographs carried GPS coordinates clustered at two addresses — neither of them the salon. Publishing them as-is would have put someone’s home on the internet.
- Inline scripts eliminated so
script-srcships without'unsafe-inline' - The third-party booking widget origin-pinned
- HSTS,
nosniff,frame-ancestors, Permissions-Policy and referrer headers shipped, then tested to confirm the policy didn’t break the booking calendar - GPS stripped from all 16 photographs, and the on-disk originals cleaned in place with hash-verified pixel integrity
- A 12-rule security guideline written for shipping assembled or generated code — each rule earned from a defect actually found on this project
What it proves
Every one of those defects lived between two vendors
The canonical tags were a “web guy” problem. The DNS record was a “domain guy” problem. The GPS data in the photos was nobody’s problem at all. None of it shows up unless one person is holding the brand, the build and the search layer at the same time. — the reason ForgeBrands sells the Forge Package as one engagement
This engagement is the Forge Package, run once before it had a name. The founding cohort exists to run it four more times and turn it into a documented, repeatable process.
Next step
Want this run on your business?
Five founding slots. Different sectors preferred — a restaurant, a professional practice, a retail shop. Tell me what you do.