Episode 1: The forty-item audit nobody fixes
In this episode
Christopher found forty things wrong with his own website in one Saturday night, and he was thrilled about it. Frances makes him prove that the forty-item audit you paid for is mostly theatre, and that the whole job is choosing the three findings that actually matter. Plus the one-page filter you can run on any report sitting in your drawer.
Takeaway: A finding you won’t fix is a fact you paid to ignore.
The artifact: The Three-Findings Audit Filter. You can grab it from the blog.
Full transcript: Episode 1
CHRISTOPHER: One Saturday night, I found forty things wrong with my own website. And I was thrilled about it. I poured a coffee at eleven at night like I’d won something. My friend Frances says that makes me a danger to my own clients. By the end of this, I’m going to show you she’s exactly half right. The other half is the most important thing I know about doing this work well.
FRANCES: This is Sites I’ve Never Seen. The show where Christopher and I open up the work behind the work. The sites, the code, the Saturday-night rabbit holes nobody else gets to listen in on, and we argue about what actually mattered. I’m Frances. I run my own shop, I read every invoice that crosses my desk, and my job here is to make this man prove what he believes before he says it to you. Christopher, you walked in with a thesis. I already told you I don’t think you can sell it. So. Sell it.
CHRISTOPHER: Here’s the thesis. The forty-page website audit you paid good money for is mostly theatre. The whole value of it is three lines you could’ve fit on a napkin. And the person who hands you forty findings instead of three isn’t being thorough. They’re skipping the hard part and charging you extra for the weight of the paper.
FRANCES: That’s a great line. I don’t trust great lines. Every consultant alive says “it depends” and hides behind a thick report, and now you’re telling me the thick report is the con. So convince me that “just do three” isn’t you being lazy and calling it wisdom. Start with your Saturday. Forty things. Take me there.
CHRISTOPHER: Gladly. Lights off except the screen. I opened View Source on one of my own pages, the raw code under the page, and asked it to count one thing. The count came back two.
FRANCES: Two of what?
CHRISTOPHER: Two answers to a question that only gets one. What is this page, mainly? My own site was telling a search engine two different stories about the same page, and letting it pick which one to believe.
FRANCES: And nothing was broken. The page loaded.
CHRISTOPHER: The page was perfect. That’s the part that hooks me every time. A tidy little checklist that morning would’ve told me the page was healthy, because it was healthy in every way a checklist can see. So I kept looking. And once you’re in there with the lights on, you find the next one, and the one under that. By the end of the week, forty. Forty real things, every one of them true.
FRANCES: Okay. Here’s where I do my job. When somebody hands me a list of forty true things, I don’t hear forty problems solved. I hear a bill. So defend it. You found forty true things. Why isn’t that just good?
CHRISTOPHER: Because true and worth-fixing are two different columns, and the audit industry reads them as one. Watch. Of my forty, how many would change anything a customer ever feels? Three. Maybe four. And I knew that Saturday night, while I was writing down the other thirty-six.
FRANCES: Hold on. You knew that, and you still wrote down forty?
CHRISTOPHER: I wrote down forty because I was curious, not because I was going to bill forty. That’s the whole distinction. And it’s exactly the one a forty-page audit erases, because once it’s printed and bound, every line looks like it’s asking to be paid for.
FRANCES: All right. Then let me make it real, because a thesis is cheap and a person is not. You want to know what your forty-page audit does once it leaves your hands? I had a client last year. Runs a small custom-furniture place, Delia, two employees, she does the books at her kitchen table on Sunday nights. She paid an agency four thousand dollars for a website audit. Came back forty-three pages. Ranked by nothing she understood. Written in a language she never agreed to learn.
CHRISTOPHER: And she read it.
FRANCES: She read the first three pages. There was a chart on page two. Red, amber, green, and forty rows, and almost all of it amber, which tells you nothing except that somebody owns a tool that makes charts. Page nine was titled “Opportunities.” Page thirty-one was titled “Further Opportunities.” She got to a line that said her “heading hierarchy was non-semantic” and she closed the laptop.
CHRISTOPHER: Non-semantic heading hierarchy. On a furniture site.
FRANCES: On a furniture site. So she felt a little sick, put it in the drawer, and every single time she logs in to add a dining table she remembers there are forty-some things wrong she’s never going to touch. The audit didn’t fix her site. It gave her a low-grade fever she carries around. And here’s the part that actually makes me angry. Three of those forty-three pages mattered. Her contact form had been silently failing for two months. Two months of people asking to buy a table, and the email just went nowhere.
CHRISTOPHER: How did she even find out?
FRANCES: That’s the part that stays with me. She didn’t find out from the audit. She found out because a woman stopped her at the farmers’ market and said, I emailed you twice about the walnut table, did you not want the work? And Delia went home, sat down at that same kitchen table on a Sunday night, opened her inbox, and it was just empty. Not angry-empty. Quiet. Eight weeks of quiet she’d read as a slow season. She told me she sat there doing the math on the tables she’d have built, out loud, to nobody.
CHRISTOPHER: And that was in the report.
FRANCES: That was in the report. Page twenty-six. Item thirty-something. Same weight on the page as the heading thing. Same amber dot. The one finding that was costing her real sales, buried at the same volume as a finding that costs her nothing, in a document she stopped reading on page three.
CHRISTOPHER: So that is my thesis with a face on it. The agency found her broken form. It was in there. They just buried it on page twenty-six instead of putting it on page one, alone, in a sentence she’d actually read.
FRANCES: They got paid for the page count. That’s the incentive, and I’m not calling them villains, I’m saying the structure rewards the thick document. A thick document looks like effort. Effort is what gets invoiced. Nobody invoices for the three sentences that would’ve actually helped Delia.
CHRISTOPHER: What were the three sentences?
FRANCES: “Delia. Your contact form is broken, you’re losing buyers right now, fix it today. The other two things on this list can wait till you’ve got a slow week. Everything else in here, file it and forget it.” Three sentences. That’s the whole product. That’s the four thousand dollars. The other forty pages were packaging.
CHRISTOPHER: And that is exactly what I do with my own forty. Watch me practice it. I can tell you the three I’d put my hand on a client’s shoulder for. The schema collision I started with, two labels fighting over what a page is, a search engine that genuinely doesn’t know which to believe. Second, an alt text on a photo that described the wrong photo, left from a swap years ago, so a blind visitor gets told they’re looking at something that isn’t there. Third, a page on my own site that had been quietly telling search engines it didn’t exist for eight months, so it slid off the results and nobody who didn’t already know the address could find it.
FRANCES: Hold on, did that third page sell anything?
CHRISTOPHER: It was a how-to that fed people into my contact form. So no invoice with my name on it, but a year of the exact people I wrote it for never arriving. Same shape as Delia’s form, just quieter. Hers stopped the buyers at the door. Mine made sure they never found the door.
FRANCES: Okay. That one I’d have put on page one too. So you’ve got three that matter. What about the other thirty-seven?
CHRISTOPHER: The other thirty-seven are mine. Not the client’s, not the invoice’s. Mine. None of them moved a sale, and most of them nobody will ever notice but me. And I’ll fix them anyway, on my own Saturdays, because I can’t quite walk past them.
FRANCES: So they’re a hobby.
CHRISTOPHER: let me back up, because “hobby” makes it sound like a waste, and I don’t want to undersell it either. There’s a word for it. Kodawari. It’s the Japanese idea of caring about one small thing long past the point anyone asked, just to get it exactly right. The thirty-seven are dots on i’s nobody but me will ever see. They’re the little gift I give myself for still caring about the work after nineteen years.
FRANCES: And the only place it turns into a problem is the second you put it on Delia’s clock, or hand her the list and call it thorough.
CHRISTOPHER: That’s exactly right, and it’s why I price everything I can as a flat rate. The customer needs to know they’re paying X dollars for a feature, full stop, the number agreed before I start. The hours I spend after that turning their code into poetry, that’s not on the invoice. That’s a gift I’m leaving for the next developer who opens the file, whoever they are. They’ll never know my name. I’d like them to have a good afternoon anyway.
FRANCES: See, now that I’ll sign. A number the customer can read, and the poetry on your own dime. That might be the cleanest thing you’ve said all day. And it’s why I respect the looking, while we’re here, and I don’t say that for free. I’d never sit down on a Saturday and read my own source code line by line. I’d ship and find out from a customer. You found it before anyone got hurt. The looking is real craft. I just price it at exactly zero past finding three.
CHRISTOPHER: And here’s where I’ll go sharper than I did walking in. The forty findings aren’t a list of problems. They’re a list of decisions somebody has to make. And when you hand a client all forty unranked, you’ve made none of them. You’ve handed the choosing back to her, the one person in the room least able to make it.
FRANCES: Say that again.
CHRISTOPHER: A long audit isn’t thoroughness. It’s a senior person declining to do the senior part. The hard part was never the finding. Anyone with the right tool finds forty. The hard part is standing in front of forty true things and saying which three matter, this month, for this exact person, and owning that call out loud.
FRANCES: And when you won’t make that call, you don’t save the client anything. You charge them for the decisions you skipped.
FRANCES: A finding you won’t fix is a fact you paid to ignore.
CHRISTOPHER: That’s the whole thing. The thirty-seven aren’t findings anymore once you’ve decided not to fix them for her. They’re just facts. Facts Delia paid for, and now gets to feel guilty about every Sunday at the kitchen table.
FRANCES: So here’s the test I’d actually give somebody listening to this. Forget the audit they paid for. Next time anyone hands you a report, on your site, your books, your insurance, whatever, don’t read it top to bottom. Ask one question first. Which three of these do we fix first, and why those three?
CHRISTOPHER: And listen for whether they can answer it. If the person who wrote it can tell you, in plain words, these three and here’s why, you’ve hired someone who was thinking about you. If they wave at the whole list and say it’s all important —
FRANCES: then all important means none chosen, which means the choosing is still your job, and you’re the worst-equipped person in the building to do it. You paid to be handed the one thing they kept.
CHRISTOPHER: I put a one-page version of this on the blog. It’s called the Three-Findings Audit Filter. You write down the three you’d fix first, the cost of leaving each one alone, and why you ranked them the way you did. You can run it on any report sitting in your drawer right now, including ones I had nothing to do with. That’s the point of it.
FRANCES: And I want to be a pain about the sheet for a second, because the sheet is the easy half.
CHRISTOPHER: Go ahead.
FRANCES: The form is trivial. Three boxes. A child could fill it in. Picking the right three? That’s the whole job, and the form doesn’t help you do it one bit. Here, let’s prove it on the air. Your audit. Your forty. I get to pick my three.
CHRISTOPHER: Go ahead. I want to see where we don’t overlap.
FRANCES: I’m fixing the three that touch money first. Number one, the same thing that nearly sank Delia. Anything on a page where a buyer tries to reach you or pay you that’s broken or slow or quietly eating submissions. Find me the leak in the bucket before I fix the paint. Two, the phone. If your checkout makes somebody pinch and zoom to find the buy button, you’re losing the half of them who shop from the couch, and you’ll never get an email telling you it happened. Three, the moment of hesitation. The page where a buyer is reaching for their wallet and something, a missing price, a shipping number that won’t load, makes them put the wallet back. That’s my three. Every one of them has a dollar sign on it, and every one of them, I can point at the line on the invoice it pays for.
CHRISTOPHER: And I’d pick differently. I’d lead with the ones that rot in the dark.
FRANCES: Course you would.
CHRISTOPHER: The schema collision first, the doubled answer, because it quietly poisons everything downstream. Then the wrong alt text, the photo that lies to the person who can’t see it, because the day a screen-reader user hits it is the day it stops being a tidy little defect and becomes someone’s bad afternoon on your site. And third, that redirect that loops, an old page pointing to a new page pointing back to the old one, so a search engine following the trail just gives up and walks away. None of those three lose you a sale you’d ever notice. That’s exactly why they sit there for years. They don’t bleed where you can see it. They teach a search engine, slowly, to mistrust the whole site.
FRANCES: And you can’t read that off the page. Nowhere on that sheet does it say “this one rots in the dark.” Mine all bleed in the open. I can show Delia the month her sales dipped. Yours, you’re asking her to trust you about a wound she can’t see and won’t feel for a year.
CHRISTOPHER: Which is the harder sell, and the more senior call, and the reason this is a person’s job and not a tool’s. Same forty findings. You pulled three, I pulled three, and we didn’t overlap on one of them.
FRANCES: Not one. Same audit, six different fixes, neither of us wrong. No sheet on earth prints that.
CHRISTOPHER: And that’s the part I could never quite say cleanly until I said it against you just now. The judgment was never which problems exist. Anyone finds forty. It’s which three you’d stake your name on this month, knowing the other thirty-seven are watching. That’s the part nineteen years buys. Not the looking. The choosing.
FRANCES: And from where I sit, the choosing is the only line item I’d ever pay full freight for. The looking, plenty of tools look. But a person who’ll stand in front of forty true things, pick three, and put a number on what the other thirty-seven cost me if I wait? That’s not a report. That’s a decision I didn’t have to make alone, and decisions are the most expensive thing I buy.
CHRISTOPHER: A shorter list you’ll actually act on, instead of a longer one you’ll only file.
FRANCES: Delia would’ve signed for that. She didn’t need forty-three pages. She needed somebody to say “these three, Delia, I’ve got you, the rest can wait.” That sentence was the product. The agency just never sold it to her.
CHRISTOPHER: So go open the audit you’ve got in the drawer. Ask which three you’d fix first. And watch the face of whoever has to answer.
FRANCES: Because that face tells you everything. Either they kept the decision for you, or they handed it back with a forty-page bow on it.
CHRISTOPHER: That’s the first one. Sites I’ve Never Seen. I’m Christopher, that was Frances, and the sheet from the back half, the Three-Findings Audit Filter, is on the blog if you want to run it on something this week. If you do, I’d genuinely love to know which three you picked. I have a feeling they won’t be the ones the report wanted you to. Glad you were here.