Decisions — Denguezli Advisory (lead build)

Denguezli Advisory has not been contacted. Per the website-builder skill's lead-mode rule,
gaps were resolved with a recommended default instead of a blocking question. Every entry
below is an override point the operator should confirm or overturn before this goes from
draft to a real proposal/go-live.

Mode

something concrete to show if/when outreach happens. Not indexed, not go-live.

Google Maps / Business Profile

Skipped the Places dossier entirely; built from the existing site only. **Recommendation to

surface in any pitch:** this business is invisible on Google Maps — a Business Profile is a

bigger opportunity than the website itself. See google-maps-listing skill if this becomes a client.

Category

Used other.md's explicit routing table ("regulated professional advice... consulting" →

lawyer-office.md) as the structural donor, stripped of all legal-specific content.

Full reasoning in build/category-mapping.md.

Languages

Spanish, per his bio) and the "Suisse, Europe, Moyen-Orient" positioning implies an

international, not purely Francophone, audience. Arabic/Spanish were considered but not

added — no evidence the *client base* (vs. just the founder) needs them; flagged as a

question for the operator rather than built speculatively.

Hours / "walk-in" framing

block on the homepage; contact copy frames scheduling as "let's arrange a call" rather than

implying drop-in availability.

Contact form

static-friendly contact form per references/contact-forms.md, but **not wired to a live

backend** (no Resend/Web3Forms account exists for a lead) — the form renders and validates

client-side; submission is stubbed with a clear TODO. Newsletter signup dropped (no ESP

account to send to; reintroduce only if the operator wants an email list).

Photography / imagery

office chair) are carried over from the existing site pending a licensing check

(see content/cautions.md) — they read as stock/AI-generated rather than owned photography.

Flagged, not blocked: removing them would leave large sections image-less, which reads

worse in a first-draft pitch than a flagged provisional image.

Logo

the "DEN GUE ZLI / ADVISORY" framed wordmark as CSS/SVG type rather than reusing the raster,

so it renders sharp at any size.

v2 redesign — 2026-08-13 (operator rejected v1)

Operator feedback: "the website design is too basic" and "looking too much like the

existing website". Both correct, and one root cause: v1 restyled denguezli.ch rather than

redesigning it — same dark-photo hero → white body → centred serif section title → four

alternating image/text rows in the same order with the same photos → dark contact → footer.

Diagnosis (six named failures): symbolic stock photography carrying the page; no grid

(everything centred in a 1120px box); the gold accent used exactly once; two unstyled <ul>/

<ol> blocks; a timid type scale (3.25rem display vs 17px body) on the web's most common

"elegant" pairing (Playfair + Open Sans); identical section padding throughout.

The insight: the old site reaches for *symbols* of what the firm does. A governance and

audit advisory actually produces documents — reports, assessments, mandates. So the site

should be set like a precisely-composed document. De-photographing it fixes both complaints at

once: typography-led layout is harder to fake and reads more expensive, and it is the single

largest departure from the existing site.

Three directions were mocked up and shown to the operator (portfolio artifact, published

2026-08-13): A "Le dossier" (paper ground, asymmetric grid, no symbolic photos), B "Le portrait"

(split hero built on the founder's portrait), C "Nuit" (fully dark, monumental type).

Operator chose A with B's portrait hero, and removal of all four stock photos. Built:

applied to every section. This is the design's identity; nothing is centred any more.

survives only in the wordmark, as the link to the existing serif logo.

along with PracticeRow.astro. Practice areas are now hairline-separated rows with a gold

index. This also retires the licensing risk flagged in cautions.md for those four files.

numbered columns (numbering earns its place there — it is a real sequence).

a 320px thumbnail. It is the firm's one genuine visual asset.

#6f6a5c (5.2:1); a separate accent-ink token added because the display gold #a8853e is

only 3.3:1 on paper and must never carry small text.

Motion system — 2026-08-13 (operator request)

Operator asked for "pleins de transitions". v2's styleguide had explicitly banned entrance

animations; that rule is superseded and the styleguide's Motion section rewritten to match

what ships. Built as one coherent system rather than scattered effects, in the brand's

register (precise, quick, no bounce): staggered reveals, hairlines that draw themselves in

from the left, count-up on the credential figures, a sticky masthead that compacts, hover

nudges, a portrait that settles from an over-scale, and Astro ClientRouter page

transitions. All motion values are tokens (motion.*), so check-tokens still passes.

Three real bugs were found and fixed during verification — worth recording because each

would have silently broken the site rather than merely looking wrong:

1. Content hidden forever if the reveal never runs. Hiding elements by default means a

failure mode where the page is simply blank. Fixed with a :where(.js-anim) gate set by

an inline head script — no JS or no IntersectionObserver means nothing is ever hidden —

plus a 3s health check that reveals everything if the observer has delivered nothing.

2. Headless renderers photographed the page half-empty. The Playwright screenshot sweep

captures the full page without scrolling, so the observer never fired below the fold: the

stat band, practice list, process steps and contact block were all invisible in the

review screenshots. Fixed by revealing everything immediately when navigator.webdriver

is true. This also protects print and audit tooling.

3. Elements jumped over stayed hidden permanently. IntersectionObserver only reports

threshold *crossings*; an element going from below the viewport to above it — a #hash

landing, a restored scroll position, Cmd+End — produces no callback at all. Verified: 17

of 26 tracked elements stayed invisible after an instant jump to the bottom. Fixed with a

rAF-throttled scroll sweep over still-pending elements. Re-verified at 0.

Verified in a real rendering browser with navigator.webdriver spoofed to false: below-fold

elements start at opacity 0 and reach 1 with their rule drawn after a human-like scroll; the

counter samples mid-flight ("11+" → "15+"); the masthead sticks; navigation to /a-propos

happens with no full page reload and re-binds the nav.

Distinctiveness review — 2026-08-13

breakpoints/icon-glyph pixels tokens-ok; no stray hex, no untracked fonts).

wordmark + compass/network/map imagery is specific to this business, not a reusable

template); hero is a full-bleed dark photo with left-aligned overlay text, not the

centered-two-CTA AI-builder default; practice areas render as edge-to-edge alternating

image/text rows (no card grid) per styleguide.

check-distinctiveness.mjs flagged two soft warnings against the last 5 registry sites:

primary #161616 within 15–38 RGB units of two other near-black sites, and accent #c6a15b

within 10 RGB units of institut-de-beaute-si-j-etais-moi-a-lutry's #c9a352 gold. Both

tokens were eyedropped directly from this business's own source material (Wix dark theme

computed styles; compass-needle and network-node photography) rather than picked from

vibes, so source fidelity wins over avoiding all resemblance — accepted as-is. Hero layout

(full-bleed photo, left-aligned overlay) differs from the last 5 sites' patterns.

wordmark (rebuilt as CSS, not the raster), and the 4 practice-area photographs; dropped the

newsletter signup and generic Wix chrome (cookie banner, "Plus" nav item) as noted above.

Re-run after the v2 redesign — 2026-08-13

layout alone: the margin-column grid, the credential band and the hairline practice rows

would survive a logo swap and still read as this firm. Hero is type-only-margin-grid —

none of the five compared registry sites use a type-only hero (all five are photo heroes).

check-distinctiveness.mjs repeats the same soft palette warnings as v1 (near-black primary,

gold accent within ~50 RGB units of two other sites); both tokens remain eyedropped from this

business's own source material, so source fidelity still wins over avoiding all resemblance.

founder's portrait; deliberately dropped the four symbolic stock photos, the alternating

photo rows, the centred layout and the serif body face, all recorded above.

Domain / publish

only, under a project-scoped subdomain. denguezli.ch referenced as the business's existing

domain in copy, never treated as ours to touch.