When I moved FindMySafari off WordPress onto a new build, I crawled all 2,245 live pages first. I checked every one against the new site, so titles, descriptions and canonical URLs matched before anything went live. That is the part of website development nobody shows you in a portfolio. Checking every URL before launch is what kept FindMySafari's search traffic intact during the move. The pages travellers had already found through search kept working after the move, with the same titles and descriptions search engines had already indexed.
Why website development is bigger than a design job
Most of what makes a site work happens where visitors cannot see it. FindMySafari is the safari marketplace I designed and built. It lets travellers compare itineraries across Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Botswana and South Africa. Underneath, it runs on Next.js, Postgres, Redis and Docker, on a VPS I manage myself.
Some of what it carries, a visitor never sees directly:
- A catalogue of 208 itineraries, filtered by destination, month and group size
- Saved trips and side-by-side comparison, with park maps drawn from real protected-area boundary data
- One enquiry form, sent only to the operators a traveller picks, up to four
- Separate portals for travellers, operators (verified with company documents and two-factor sign-in) and an admin team, with an audit log
The enquiry form saves the traveller time: booking a safari usually means emailing several operators one by one, and here they fill in their trip once and the operators they pick receive it.
The site also runs in five languages, English, German, French, Spanish and Italian, across 1,316 translated pages. Website design and development often get treated as two separate jobs. Development decides whether the design works for the person actually using the site.
Why a redesign can lose the traffic you already earned
Search engines treat a changed URL as a new page. When a redesign renames or moves pages without matching the old addresses to the new ones, the pages people already reach through search can quietly stop working for them. That is why the FindMySafari move started with the old site, before the new one went live.
If you are talking to website developers about a redesign, ask what happens to your existing URLs on day one. A move that breaks them quietly loses the audience you already built, not the one you are trying to win next. I write about tracking that kind of change properly, comparison periods included, in Search Console reporting: check the comparison first.
Good website design starts with the person using it
She Writes is a poetry journal I built for writer Murugi Gitonga, launched in October 2026. All 36 of her posts from 2017 to 2025 moved across with their original dates, sorted into five categories. A "read next" trail lets a reader who likes one poem find another. I also built her a custom WordPress writing-desk plugin, so she sees only the tools she needs, plus shareable quote cards and audio readings of her own poems.
The groundwork, author schema, a sitemap, Search Console and Analytics, was in place from day one. Author schema tells search engines who wrote a piece, and a sitemap tells them which pages exist. Search Console and Analytics are the tools for watching how a site's search presence changes over time. Treating each project as its own piece of evidence is something I write about in Build evidence of your skills, one useful project at a time.
Signal, my weekly newsletter, goes through the full migration checklist that I keep out of this page. If you have a site to build or rebuild, tell me about it through Contact, or see what website design and development looks like in practice.