ghalibashrafi.comRebuilt by hand, no framework, no build step

The problem they came with

We needed a site that would still be fast, crawlable and editable in five years, by whoever is here then. Most agency sites are built on a stack that makes that impossible within eighteen months — a framework nobody upgrades, a CMS carrying three hundred plugins, a build step that stops working when a dependency moves.

What we did

1. 01

   Static PHP with shared includes

   No React, no build pipeline, no plugin surface. Every page is a file you can open and read.

2. 02

   Templates for anything repeated

   Location pages, job pages, portfolio pages and case studies each render from one template and a data array, so a change happens once rather than nineteen times.

3. 03

   A QA script that renders the page

   Schema validity, FAQ markup matching the visible text, heading order, tag nesting, links that resolve, images that exist. It reads the output a browser sees, not the template.

4. 04

   Redirects planned before launch

   All 24 old URLs mapped, because a rebuild that loses the rankings it inherited is not a rebuild, it is an expensive reset.

What happened

Thirty pages, zero QA failures, no JavaScript framework. The script also caught what review never would: copy being HTML-escaped twice, printing a raw entity as visible text in 65 places across pages that validated perfectly and looked entirely correct in the markup.

Our own site — you are reading it; view source and check

What was hard

Rendering the pages found copy being HTML-escaped twice, so an apostrophe printed as raw entity text in 65 places — on pages that validated perfectly. Reading the markup would never have caught it.

Check this yourself

View source on this page, then run it through Google’s Rich Results Test. Every claim about how it is built is inspectable in two minutes.

We would rather you tested one claim on this page than took all of them on trust. If something here does not hold up, tell us and it comes down — that is the arrangement, and the rest of the checklist is published too.