Notes on web design, performance and building websites, from East Kilbride.https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/en-gbhttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/the-word-loan-took-our-site-offline/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/the-word-loan-took-our-site-offline/Nominet suspended a .uk domain three days after we registered it, with no warning, in an email indistinguishable from phishing. What happened, why the process is worth knowing about, and how to avoid it costing you a client.Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/data-strategy-is-the-ai-project/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/data-strategy-is-the-ai-project/Most AI work fails long before the model. It fails in the reconciliation nobody wanted to do, and no amount of model selection rescues it.Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/explainability-is-not-a-feature/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/explainability-is-not-a-feature/If a model contributes to a decision someone can challenge, the explanation has to be produced by the same machinery that produced the answer.Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/why-ai-pilots-stall/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/why-ai-pilots-stall/The gap between a convincing pilot and a system people use is not a modelling gap. It is the work nobody scoped.Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/childrens-data-in-club-software/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/childrens-data-in-club-software/Youth clubs hold sensitive information about children, gathered by volunteers, in whatever tool was convenient. Most of the risk is avoidable and none of it is complicated.Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/club-software-abandoned/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/club-software-abandoned/Most clubs have tried a system and stopped using it. The reason is rarely the software being bad, and almost always the same thing.Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/collecting-subs-without-the-chase/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/collecting-subs-without-the-chase/Chasing subscriptions is the job that burns out club treasurers. Most of the fix is structural rather than a matter of reminding people harder.Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/accessibility-is-a-build-practice/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/accessibility-is-a-build-practice/An accessibility audit at the end of a project finds real problems at the most expensive possible moment. Almost all of them were avoidable weeks earlier.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/audit-trails-questions-not-asked-yet/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/audit-trails-questions-not-asked-yet/Most logging records that something happened. What gets asked later is why, by whom, and what the system knew at the time, which is a different design.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/best-automation-nobody-notices/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/best-automation-nobody-notices/Most automation fails at adoption rather than at build. Anything that asks people to open another system is competing with a process that already works.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/building-for-the-handover/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/building-for-the-handover/Every supplier relationship ends. Whether that is routine or painful is decided by choices made in the first month, not the last one.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/certification-expiry-is-operational/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/certification-expiry-is-operational/A lapsed card is discovered at a site gate on a Monday morning. The information needed to prevent it existed for months in a system nobody planning work could see.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/class-booking-is-a-capacity-problem/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/class-booking-is-a-capacity-problem/Most booking systems are built as diaries. The thing operators actually need to manage is the gap between what was booked and what turned up.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/compliance-evidence-as-a-by-product/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/compliance-evidence-as-a-by-product/Most firms assemble evidence for an audit by going and finding it. The alternative is a system where the record accumulates as the work is done.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/compliant-hours-tired-driver/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/compliant-hours-tired-driver/Hours rules cap how long someone can be on duty. They were never designed to measure whether that person is fit to drive, and the gap between the two is where incidents happen.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/consent-is-not-a-checkbox/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/consent-is-not-a-checkbox/A single agreement at registration is easy to build and rarely means what it claims. Real consent is granular, revocable, and has to survive contact with a live system.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/counting-downtime-honestly/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/counting-downtime-honestly/Two teams reporting on the same outage produce different numbers, and both are correct. Until the definition is settled, every improvement figure is unfalsifiable.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/defect-reported-then-waited/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/defect-reported-then-waited/Daily vehicle checks are near-universal and largely wasted. The problem is almost never the check itself. It is what happens in the hours after one finds something.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/designing-for-people-not-concentrating/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/designing-for-people-not-concentrating/Media interfaces are used habitually, for hours, by people doing something else. Friction that is acceptable on first use becomes intolerable by the hundredth.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/designing-for-the-disrupted-day/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/designing-for-the-disrupted-day/Most travel software is designed around the timetable. Passengers judge it almost entirely on the days the timetable stops being true.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/first-six-weeks-membership/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/first-six-weeks-membership/Most cancellations are set in motion long before anyone cancels. The window that matters is much earlier and much shorter than most operators plan for.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/offline-first-site-software/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/offline-first-site-software/Offline-first is not a feature you add to site software. It is a decision that shapes the data model, the sync strategy and the interface, and it has to be made early.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/one-product-four-answers/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/one-product-four-answers/Ask four retail systems how many of something you have and you will get four numbers. The reconciliation that follows is a symptom, not the problem.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/orr-fatigue-evidence/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/orr-fatigue-evidence/Managing fatigue is a legal duty in rail. Producing evidence that you manage it is a separate problem, and it is the one that catches operators out.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/plant-utilisation-blind-spot/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/plant-utilisation-blind-spot/Most infrastructure businesses cannot say what their plant did last month. The cost of that is larger than it looks, and it is rarely a data problem.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/predictive-maintenance-people-act-on/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/predictive-maintenance-people-act-on/The hard part is not predicting the failure. It is producing a prediction an engineer is willing to take an asset offline for.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/recommendation-is-a-metadata-problem/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/recommendation-is-a-metadata-problem/Recommendation projects are scoped as machine learning work. They usually stall on a taxonomy nobody owns and a back catalogue that was tagged by whoever ingested it.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/replatforming-is-not-a-strategy/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/replatforming-is-not-a-strategy/The plan to replace everything at once is the plan that never finishes. Most retail estates are improved by deciding what stays, not by deciding what goes.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/retention-rules-that-run-themselves/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/retention-rules-that-run-themselves/Most retention policies are documents. The data they describe is still there, because deletion was left to a person with more urgent work.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/returns-are-a-data-problem/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/returns-are-a-data-problem/Returns get managed as a warehouse cost. Most of the rate is decided much earlier, by information that was wrong or missing on the product page.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/safest-record-not-collected/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/safest-record-not-collected/Most data protection effort goes on securing information that never needed to exist. Minimisation is the cheapest control available and the least used.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/search-is-what-people-use-when-recommendation-fails/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/search-is-what-people-use-when-recommendation-fails/Discovery investment goes to recommendation. Search gets the budget left over, despite being the thing people reach for when they know exactly what they want.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/what-a-white-label-app-is-worth/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/what-a-white-label-app-is-worth/Putting your own brand on the app members use is not vanity. It changes who the relationship belongs to, and it shows up in the numbers.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/where-the-hour-actually-went/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/where-the-hour-actually-went/Firms automate the process someone complained about loudest. The expensive work is usually quieter than that, and finding it takes a fortnight of watching.Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/welcome-to-the-new-site/https://www.bigswebdesign.co.uk/blog/welcome-to-the-new-site/Why the site moved from hand-written PHP to a modern static build, and what changed under the bonnet.Sun, 09 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT