The Websites: A Year of Building Infrastructure for Real Businesses

Seven sites, three in detail

JAMARQ built and maintains websites and admin systems for seven businesses. Each one replaced either nothing at all or a site that couldn't do the job it was supposed to do. Three of them show the range well.

Midway Music Hall

Midway Music Hall had no website. Shows spread by word of mouth, and seats were reserved by phone or in person. The owners kept meeting people who lived nearby and had never heard of the place.

JAMARQ built a schedule, a page for every show, and a seating chart where people pick their own seats and send a seat request. Behind it is an admin the venue runs day to day: seat requests, an inbox, media, lessons and repeating dance nights, rentals for the hall, and a plain-English record of who changed what. Reservations now come in online, and the regulars who still call get entered into the same system, so there's one list instead of two.

Thunder Road Bar & Grill

Thunder Road was paying for a vendor-hosted site that was slow to update and didn't look like the restaurant. The new site carries the menu, reservation requests based on kitchen hours, and job applications. The admin lets the owners edit the menu, handle reservations and applications, and post weekly staff shifts, including bar shifts that run past midnight.

The owners update it themselves now, and it brings in reservations, applications and messages every week without much attention from anyone.

Midway Mobile Storage

Midway Mobile Storage rents and sells shipping containers in Winston-Salem. Its old site had no working way to ask for a quote. JAMARQ built a quote form that asks the questions the front desk actually needs answered, so the first reply can be a real answer instead of a list of follow-up questions. Every request lands in an admin where it gets worked, alongside messages, inventory, orders and job applications. The first online quote came in 16 days after launch.

The other four

Surplus Containers sells containers to the trade and now has a public inventory and an email campaign system that respects unsubscribes. Midway Junk Removal went from a Facebook page to a site built for search, with a quote form that goes straight to the owner and spam protection that doesn't make customers solve a puzzle. Bow Wow's Dog Spa and Midway Town Center are built, and are being filled in by their owners before they fully open to the public.

The part nobody sees

In September, JAMARQ moved six of these sites off the shared hosting they started on and onto a newer platform: Next.js on Vercel, with Turso for the databases and Cloudflare R2 for files.

The goal of a move like that is that nothing visible changes. So before each one, real requests to the old site were recorded and then replayed against the new version, and the answers compared. If the new version answered differently, that was a bug to fix before anyone switched over.

That testing paid for itself. It turned up bugs in JAMARQ's own earlier code. On Thunder Road alone it found 19, including two security issues: login tokens that kept working after an account was deleted, and staff accounts that could open any job application. All of them were fixed before the switch. Thunder Road's cutover took 26 minutes, late at night. Midway Music Hall moved 9,596 rows of data in about an hour, with zero differences in the checks afterward. At Midway Mobile Storage, customers saw the same screens the day after the move as the day before.

Customers didn't notice any of it, which was the whole point.

What a year of this taught us

A website isn't a design project. It's infrastructure. It has to load fast, say the right things, take the right requests, and keep working long after launch. The three sites above scored 99 to 100 for desktop performance on PageSpeed Insights when measured in early October, but the number matters less than the habit behind it: someone has to keep looking after the thing.

The full case studies, with screenshots and the technical write-ups, are on the case studies page. Tomorrow's note is about the software.