Notes from the studio
Essays, case-study deep-dives, and field notes from building websites and AI tools at Rough Works.
Cut From 1967: A Design Still Bleeding Through
A brand identity design case study: eleven golden-age print ads rebuilt as a clickable homepage hero — what translated, what resisted, and the one constraint.
AI SEO agent: what to automate and what to leave alone
An AI SEO agent should audit, validate keywords, schedule and publish — and stop there. What we automated on our own site, and the guardrail that matters.
Contractor website examples that actually get calls
What separates a construction website that books work from one that just looks tidy — service areas, proof of work, and the quote request that gets finished.
Google Ads conversions vs GA4: why they never match
Google Ads conversions vs GA4 never reconcile. We audited our own funnel and found 61 of 65 were a CI robot. How to spot a synthetic conversion, with SQL.
Law firm website design examples, and why they work
Nine patterns from law firm websites that actually convert, drawn from firms we have built and audited — intake, practice-area architecture and proof.
WordPress to static site: migration and deploy pipeline
Moving WordPress to a static site is the easy part. The deploy pipeline and the redirects are not. Here is both, from our own migration.
Hiring an agency: the questions that reveal the good ones
Before hiring an agency, know the 12 questions to ask, the ownership clause that traps businesses, how pricing models shift risk, and the top red flags.
Law firm website design: costs, musts, judging bids
What law firm website design must accomplish, what drives cost, how to structure practice areas to rank, and questions that separate good proposals from pricey ones.
A backyard that builds itself as you scroll, in WebGL
1,288 parts, 15 build stages, one source of truth driving a real-time WebGL scene and a Blender render. How the Lamacraft sequence works, and what's next.
How to audit conversion tracking in a Google Ads funnel
A conversion count is a claim assembled by six systems, none validating meaning. Eleven checks we run before trusting conversion tracking data.
Craft beverage sites: age gates, stockists, pages that sell
Why the traditional age gate costs your beverage brand search traffic, how to build a stockist finder that converts, and two pages most brands skip.
The 1,000-page site with no internal linking
We audited 1,200 URLs: templates averaged 8.6 links per page, but editorial internal linking averaged just 1.1—and 6 of 14 pages had none. Here's the fix.
What 4,739 runs taught us about site speed variance
We ran Lighthouse 4,739 times on 39 unchanged pages over 77 days. Site speed scores swung 66 points with no deploys. Which numbers to trust, which to skip.
How to measure AI search traffic (your dashboard lies)
AI search referrals get classified inconsistently, most influence is unattributable, and one accidental crawler choice removes sites from citations. Fix it.
WordPress vs Webflow vs Shopify: the year-three cost
A decision tree, honest comparison matrix, and what changes by year three on WordPress and rivals—maintenance, who adds page types, and exit costs.
Website rebuild or repair? Our rubric before you spend
Five conditions justify a website rebuild. Everything else—dated looks, slow speed, poor conversion—is a repair. The rubric, the order, and hidden costs.
Berner Crawl v2: what AI tools still can't do in art
We rebuilt Berner Crawl's art and combat with AI tools in the loop. The interesting part isn't what they produced—it's the wall they hit, and how we got past it.
7 engineering problems AI design tools didn't solve for us
Building a roguelike RPG demands scaling, narrative, performance, and procedural rendering at once. See how Rough Works leveraged AI design tools in Berner Crawl.
OLVR ring scroll: Rolex 3D via Shopify custom development
Rolex uses WebGL for scroll-rotating watches. Our Shopify custom development for OLVR used 360 pre-rendered frames: better fidelity, lower cost, 95+ Lighthouse.
4 Awwwards 2026 lessons for brand identity design briefs
Bruno Simon's WebGPU portfolio, UNESCO's stolen artifacts museum, 100 Lost Species, Farm Minerals: four case studies on brand identity design in 2026.
Claude Design walkthrough: great tool, not a designer
Anthropic's Claude Design is the best design-to-code tool yet, but this Claude Design walkthrough shows why a real designer still matters for great work.
Claude Code 2026: AI website development from the CLI
Opus 4.7, Claude Design, Stainless, KPMG at 276,000 seats: Anthropic moves fast. The state of play, and where an agency adds leverage in AI website development.
The SEO strategy that ranks: topic clusters for 2026
Most agencies preach SEO silos and topic clusters without shipping the internal-linking SEO strategy behind them. Here's our system, plus the audit tool.
AI website maintenance: a daily SEO audit agent
A scheduled GitHub Actions workflow for AI website maintenance: it scans every blog post, classifies it into a content silo, scores SEO health, and reports findings.
Edge security hosting for WordPress in 2026: real setup
WordPress is the web's most-attacked CMS. Cloudflare's free WAF and edge security hosting cut the noise—here's the exact rule set we run, and why each exists.
Headless WordPress development with Claude API: 2026
WordPress as the CMS, a static front-end as the public site, and Claude API quietly handling editorial work between them. Our go-to WordPress development pattern.
Why we rebuilt roughworks.ca as an AI-enhanced website
Our agency site ran on WordPress and a page builder. It worked. We swapped it for a static, AI-enhanced website anyway. Here's what changed and why it took a day.
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