- Details
- Written by: rainer haage
- Hits: 49
Type "how to build a website" into any search engine and you'll get a dozen tools promising a finished site in an afternoon. And they're not lying — Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, and a growing wave of AI website generators genuinely can produce something that loads in a browser within minutes. The barrier to having a website has never been lower.
But there's a difference between a website existing and a website working. Performance, findability, trust, and long-term cost are all shaped by decisions most DIY tools never let you make — and increasingly, by decisions AI tools make for you without telling you. Here's where that gap actually shows up.
- Details
- Written by: rainer haage
- Hits: 282
My interest in web accessibility didn't begin with a technical specification. It began with a conversation — or rather, with many conversations, over the three years I spent working at a special needs college.
I worked there not as a web developer but as a facilitator, and during that time I had the conversations that inspired me to make accessibility a priority.
- Details
- Written by: rainer haage
- Hits: 640
I want to talk about templates. Not because I'm opposed to them in principle — there are contexts where a well-chosen template makes complete sense — but because I've spent 25 years watching small businesses make the same mistake, and it costs them more in the long run than they saved up front.
- Details
- Written by: rainer haage
- Hits: 752
GDPR has been law since May 2018. It has now been in force for eight years. And yet, in my experience reviewing websites I've been asked to take over or improve, the majority still have meaningful compliance issues — not because their owners are careless, but because GDPR is genuinely more complex than it appears, and because a lot of the advice circulating online is wrong or incomplete. I want to be honest with you, I am not claiming, that I can give you the whole picture here. I am not a lawyer, and nothing in this post should be taken as legal advice.
What I can offer is the perspective of a web developer who has spent years implementing GDPR-compliant solutions — understanding where technical implementation goes wrong, and what a genuinely compliant site looks like versus one that merely has a cookie banner. Because there is a very significant difference between those two things.
- Details
- Written by: rainer haage
- Hits: 1841
When Dr Jerricah Holder approached me about turning her School Wellbeing Cards system into an app, I immediately knew: I have to get this job. This wasn't just another app project — this was about two things I deeply care about: the human mind and education.
