Hand Over Every Key

Last Friday I handed over my first client website built through Syntax Labs. It’s for SafeSideline, a sports-safety app for school athletics. Krystal Tyree now owns every piece of it: the code, the hosting, the domain.

The Insight

SafeSideline keeps the record of how a game night was run. Who read the emergency plan, what got checked before kickoff, and what happened, in order, when an athlete went down. It’s pre-launch and recruiting pilot schools. So the site had one job: show a school that record before it signs up.

The usual way to start a site like this is a mockup. A static picture, a round of comments, another picture. I skipped it. A mockup asks a client to imagine how something will feel on a phone. I wanted Krystal holding the real thing.

The Fix

I built three working design directions as real pages, not pictures. Krystal clicked through each one on her phone and picked the cinematic one. No guessing from a picture.

The proof piece was a printable sample record. It’s fictional, and one checklist item is left unticked on purpose. A record that shows every box ticked looks like marketing. A real record shows what was missed too, and that’s what a school needs to trust it.

Claude Code wrote the code. I set the scope, the design and the rules, then did the checking: 12 screen sizes, accessibility checks, and a pass to make sure the site still works with JavaScript turned off. Writing code is the cheap part now. Knowing what to check is the job.

Then the handover. The code went to her GitHub. The hosting went to her Netlify. The site runs on her own domain. Under three weeks of build time, and nothing about it depends on my accounts.

The Hard Truth

Handing over every key means I can’t quietly fix something at midnight. If it breaks, Krystal calls me, or she calls someone else. That’s the point. A client who can fire me without losing her site is a client who trusts the work, not the lock-in.

Plenty of builds go the other way. The developer keeps the hosting, the domain sits on their account, and the client finds out the day they try to leave. I’d rather be hired back than held onto.

Every key, on day one. It’s the cleanest way I know to finish a job.