Writing
Notes on how small-business websites actually work.
Long-form pieces — measured, sourced, written for owners and operators. Not for other agencies.
Most marketing writing on the web is for other marketers. These essays aren't. They're written for the Ontario contractor, builder, broker, or service-business owner who has been told something about their website — that it's slow, that it needs SEO, that it should have a chatbot — and wants to know what's actually true.
Each piece is a single argument worked out in full, with primary sources linked inline. The shorter notes draw a sharp distinction; the longer ones do the full literature pass. The research that backs them lives in the public Knowledge Base.
-
· 6 min read
Answers your customers can find themselves
A service business spends a fair part of its working day answering the same handful of questions from people who haven't hired it yet. Put those answers on a searchable page on the business's own site, and the customer finds the one that fits their situation without waiting on a call back.
-
· 7 min read
Enterprise tools are open to small businesses now
A customer account area, a live market snapshot, a searchable body of knowledge, a small tool that does real work — none of these were a possibility for a one-person business twenty years ago. They are now. The story of how that shift happened, and what a small business can finally put in front of a customer because of it.
-
· 9 min read
The website as a working part of the business
A website does work when a visitor can start something on it, check on an account, look something up, or get an answer they could not have got on their own. Four kinds of work; one general argument; sourced where the evidence is there.
-
· 8 min read
Real estate agents already hold the data for their own market-intelligence tool
Sold prices are a tap away now. The deeper field set behind them — listing-history chains, sub-market absorption, list-to-sold spreads, showing analytics — is still credentialled and almost entirely underused.
-
· 4 min read
A good tool grabs you from several directions at once
When a good tool lands well, it doesn't hold someone for one reason. Several things are happening at the same moment, and the pile-up is the point.
-
· 16 min read
Google search changed in 2026, and the 2019 SEO playbook is now a penalty
Half of tracked queries now surface an AI Overview. Clicks on the organic results below collapse by 61% when one appears. Keyword stuffing — the discipline that built a generation of agency contracts — is the only intervention measured in the foundational generative-engine study that performs worse than doing nothing. Fourteen sources cited.
-
· 18 min read
The WordPress site is slow, but not for the reason the agency is telling you
Where the WordPress performance gap actually comes from in 2026 — hosting, page builders, plugin sprawl — and when migration is and is not the answer. Ten sources cited.