I'm going to be honest. Today I almost cheated.
Day 6 was meant to be the McIndoe Media Works reveal. The site was already live. I had a tidy little recap blog half-written. I could have shipped it, ticked the box, and walked away.
Then Brandon came over.
Ten minutes in, the "quick review" became a full creative spiral. New ideas, better section logic, content plans, future trips, CrossFit events, Europe, fishing, brand work, thumbnails, reels, the lot.
Good work. Useful work.
But not the kind of work that gives you a clean blog headline at 4pm.
So I had three options.
- Use the site I already built and pretend that was today's build.
- Delete the blog idea and hope nobody noticed.
- Solve the actual problem sitting underneath the website.
The problem was not "does Brandon have a cool site?"
He does. Two modes, even. One toggle in the corner flips the entire personality of the site. Calm orange, sharp typography, "Own the moment" when he's pitching events and brands. Neon green and pink, all caps, "Beef. Action. Chaos." when he's filming CrossFit comps and fishing trips. Same shooter. Two completely different audiences. One website that knows the difference.
McIndoe Media Works on the left, when he's pitching events, brands and corporate work. BEEF.PROD on the right, when he's filming CrossFit, fishing trips and chaos. Same shooter, two lenses. One toggle.
The actual problem was who keeps it alive when he's busy.
Brandon is a videographer, photographer and designer. If you've ever worked around video editing, you know how intense it is. The last thing he needs after a 12-hour shoot is to log into a website, hunt for a thumbnail file, swap a link, and hope he didn't break the layout.
And selfishly, I do not want to become the guy who has to manually update his site every time he comes home with footage.
He's heading to Australia to film CrossFit events. After that, Europe. More work, more stories, more moments worth showing.
I do not want to wait two months to promote any of it because the website needs me.
So today's actual build became the thing that lets the site keep growing after launch.
The first version of a CMS.
Or really, an app on his phone for editing his own website. Not a giant dashboard. Not another platform for him to learn. Just a content admin that opens straight onto the job he actually has to do.
One tap to pick which site he's editing, McIndoe Media Works or BEEF.PROD. One dropdown to pick a section: Hero, Featured, Work, Reach, Events, About, FAQ, or Book and Contact. Three buttons for what he's doing: Add, Swap, or Adjust.
Pick the empty Work card. Paste or upload an image. Add a title and a click URL. Preview it inside the actual section style. Save a draft or queue the update.
That's the whole thing.
It takes whatever URL he throws at it. Direct image link, Google Drive, Dropbox, Vimeo, YouTube, Instagram reel. Whatever is already sitting on his phone after the shoot. He doesn't need to download it, rename it, resize it or re-upload it. Paste, preview, post.
The important bit was the preview.
Version one of this had a "site preview" that just loaded the live published site in a window. Sounds clever, until you realise it shows the site as it is right now, not the change Brandon's actually trying to make. Useless.
So I tore it out and built a small mock of the Work section instead. When Brandon pastes a direct image URL, the empty card he selected fills in with his image, sitting right next to the other empty cards. He sees what his site will look like, not what it already looks like.
That's the difference between a CMS that technically works and a CMS someone might actually use.
I also fixed the paste behaviour properly. Direct image URLs render straight away. Instagram links get saved as the card's click URL instead of pretending to be thumbnails. URLs that aren't actually images explain what's wrong instead of just doing nothing.
And because this is still version one, the buttons tell the truth. Save Draft says it saved locally. Update Website says the demo update is queued, preview only, not live. No fake magic. No pretend backend.
That part comes next.
Today I nearly used the work I'd already done and called it a day.
Instead, I shipped the first version of the thing that keeps Brandon's site alive while he's out making the work.
Because a website launch is a moment. A website that stays useful is a workflow.
So no, I didn't cheat.
I just nearly did.