Bates Solutions online presence

A small business needs to be findable and believable: a site that loads fast and says what it does, a contact form that reaches someone, a Google listing, a LinkedIn page, and the same facts in every one of them. Most end up with those built at different times by different people, and the first thing to go wrong is that they stop agreeing. The site says one thing, LinkedIn another, and a two-year-old number sits on a page nobody remembers making.

In September 2026 Bates Solutions needed all of it at once: a company site, a brand to put on it, the profiles around it, and for me as the owner a personal site and a resume that held up. I built it as I’d build it for a client, and kept the process, so it’s now a service.

• A brand made as code. Colour and type tokens, a logo mark generated from geometry in four colourways, favicons, an email signature, and every social image (LinkedIn, Google, GitHub) rendered from templates. Change a colour once and every asset regenerates. A test checks the colours meet WCAG contrast.
• One library of facts. Every project, role and number lives once, in one place. Every figure needs a source (a repository, a URL, or “first-hand” with a date), and a client is only named once they’ve said yes.
• The company site. bates-solutions.com on Astro: services, about, contact, case studies with diagrams, light and dark themes. Every change has to pass a mobile Lighthouse score of 95 in every category, axe at WCAG 2.1 AA in both themes, full-page visual snapshots and a JavaScript budget before it can merge.
• A contact form that protects the mail. One Lambda serves both sites’ forms: a Turnstile check, a throttle, then SES. Every form gets Turnstile because the email reputation is shared across the account, and one spam run can stop all of it.
• The profiles. LinkedIn company page and owner profile, a launch post and seven weekly case study posts, Google Business Profile with a service area instead of a home address, Search Console and Bing for both domains, the handles reserved on five networks, and the business verified with Meta.
• The owner’s side. mbates.net, a personal site in the shape of a terminal; a resume built to two pages as an ATS-safe .docx and a designed PDF, with a variant per application; and GitHub profiles for the company and for me, with their own banner and section images.

Keeping every number true everywhere

The same figures appear on the company site, the personal site, the resume and LinkedIn: merged pull requests per project, years, hospitals. Counts like pull requests grow every week, so a figure that was right in September is wrong by November, and nobody notices because each copy looks fine on its own.

So the numbers aren’t typed into pages. Each count is defined once, re-counted from GitHub by a script, and locked in a file with its query and date. Pages and the resume read the lock, and a test fails if any copy of a number disagrees with it, or if a resume line states a count that nothing locks.

On 23 October the refresh showed every count had moved, Ocean Wise from 440 to 460 merged pull requests and Well-Plated from 357 to 394, and that the refresh itself had broken, because one repository had moved to a new GitHub organisation. One fix to the query, one run, and the test listed every page, profile draft and resume line still holding an old number. The site’s 26 visual snapshots that changed were checked, and the only difference in them was the numbers.