How I Run Client Web Projects: The Notion System Behind Every Build

Most of what goes wrong on a web project is not technical. It is a decision nobody wrote down, a scope change nobody priced, or a client who cannot tell what state their project is in. Every build I take on runs on the same Notion system, sized to the project, specifically to remove those failure modes.

Two views of the same project

There is an internal workspace and a client portal. The internal workspace has everything: requirements, architecture notes, the sprint board, the bug tracker, deployment history. The client portal is a separate, plain-language view built for the client: where things stand, what is with them, what is next, and what has been paid. The client is never asked to read engineering tracking to find out if their site is on schedule.

Decisions are recorded before they are acted on

Every scope, commercial, or technical call goes into a decision log with a date and a short rationale, at the point it is made. Choosing shared hosting over cloud for a first version. Dropping a product line. Changing a contact number site-wide. Months later, "why is it like this" has a written answer, and a change of mind is a new dated entry, not an argument about memory.

Architecture decisions get the same treatment

Bigger builds carry architecture decision records: the choice, the options considered, the reason, and the known trade-offs. These are what let a project be picked up later, by me or by someone else, without reverse-engineering intent from the code.

Scope changes are visible and priced

A change request is a row: what changed, why, what it affects, and what it costs in time or money. It is not a favour absorbed silently into the timeline. This protects the client as much as the developer, because it makes the original scope, and every deviation from it, explicit.

Sized to the project

A platform build gets the full system: personas, roadmap, risk register, the lot. A small landing page gets a deliberately lean version, one board for actions, one log for decisions, designed to be duplicated as the starting point for the next small job. The point is not ceremony. It is that nothing important is only in someone’s head.

“A project you cannot see the state of is a project that is already drifting.”

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