The Neobrutalist Relaunch

If you had to point at one day and say "this is when the project stopped looking like a prototype", it's this one. Look at the commit list from May 29th and it reads less like a day of work and more like a whole relaunch compressed into one sitting: a new visual identity, rebuilt marketing pages, a sitemap, structured data, performance work, and an early, slightly odd bet on how AI crawlers read websites. This is the direct follow-up to the first post on this blog: that one was why, this is how the actual product got built.

A Look, Finally

Before this, the site didn't really have a visual identity, it had whatever came out of building features in a hurry. What replaced it is still what the whole site looks like today: thick black borders, hard drop shadows offset from every card and button, a yellow-and-teal palette that refuses to sit quietly in the background. Neobrutalist is the closest one-word label for it. It's opinionated on purpose. A party game shouldn't look like a SaaS dashboard.

Built to Be Found

Alongside the redesign, the marketing pages got rebuilt so they'd actually load correctly and render properly for search engines and social previews, the difference between a link that unfurls into something worth clicking and one that shows up as a bare grey box. That's a story about what the pages became, not about the machinery behind how they get built, so that's as far as this one goes.

Getting Ahead of AI Crawlers

The odder addition, in hindsight the most interesting one: an llms.txt file and explicit instructions for AI crawlers, added months before "AI SEO" was a phrase anyone outside a few blogs was using. There was no grand strategy behind it, more a hunch that AI answer engines were going to start mattering for how people find things and it seemed cheap to just tell them what the site was, plainly, ahead of time.

The Unglamorous Half: Performance

The rest of the day was pure maintenance: dropping libraries nobody was actually using, changing how fonts load so text doesn't sit invisible while a web font downloads, and a general page-speed pass. None of that is a feature you can point at. All of it is the difference between a page that feels instant and one that feels like a website.

None of it moved the numbers yet, and that's worth saying honestly. The surrounding week, May 25th through 31st, totaled around 10 clicks and 81 impressions across the entire site, average position hovering in the 6-to-9 range. Quiet, almost nothing. This is the week the foundation got poured, though, and the numbers wouldn't really start moving for almost another month.