Hook and Eye Company — Questions & To Do

Two parts. The first is a short list of things I need a read on from you before I can keep moving. You do not need to answer them in advance — they are the agenda for Friday. If you want to answer any of them over text before the meeting, that is useful; if you would rather walk through them live, also fine.

The second is a To Do section: items I am drafting in your absence so the build does not stall while we wait for session 01. None of these are committed; they all need your read before they go live. I am surfacing them here so you know what is in flight.

I have grouped the questions by urgency. The first group blocks work; the second shapes work; the third can wait.

Blocking — I need answers to move past session 01

1. Design direction. Which of the four directions in the options slate (A — graphic-novel primary, B — graphic-novel accent, C — atelier / maker-craft, D — theater program) do we build toward? A hybrid is fine; a fifth direction is fine. Provisional commitment is also fine — we can ratify "try A for a week" and revisit.

2. Wix credentials handoff. I need account access to pull down the current content, screenshots, and any assets that live on your Wix side before we can start the domain transfer or rebuild against real copy. How would you like to hand these to me — screenshare + password-manager walk-through on Friday, or earlier?

3. Domain-transfer green-light. Do you want to proceed with the Wix → Porkbun → Cloudflare path described in the domain-transfer document? If yes, when is a good two-week window to start (the transfer itself is mostly waiting, but there are a few active moments where we should not be traveling or offline).

Shaping — these change the build, not the start

4. Photography. The site gets much stronger with good photography. Do you have a backlog of existing shop photos we can pull from, or should we plan a short photo session for the Who-We-Are page, Process page, and Work case studies? A two-hour session with a local photographer is usually enough for the whole site and is the single biggest lift we can make.

5. Portfolio selection. Which three-to-five projects do you want featured first? Commercial partners prefer the buyer-impressive ones (Lego, Texas Rose Festival, film work); the register-setting argument for first-time visitors prefers the ones that show range and craft. You will have strong instincts here — I would rather defer to yours than guess.

6. Badge permissions. For the commercial-partner logo strip on Home: which partners have you cleared or are easy to clear to use their logo? Which would you rather we leave off? If any require a written ask, let me know and I can draft the request. (See To Do § below — Taylor (in your absence) drafted a partner-badge ask letter you can use as a starting point.)

7. Team page treatment. You told me unified, not grad-school-bios. Inside "unified" there is still a choice: one shop paragraph and a group photo, or one shop paragraph plus one-sentence cameos for each person. Preference?

8. Services cut. Commission & Build vs. Alterations & Tailoring as two sections on one Services page — right cut, or do you want them on separate pages?

9. Calendly. Are you willing to let people book directly into your calendar for alteration drop-offs and fittings? If yes, what time blocks should be bookable (e.g., Tuesday–Thursday 10am–4pm, or whatever your actual pattern is)? If you want me to set up Calendly, I will need access to a Google Workspace calendar to connect it to.

10. Contact-page phone number. Do you want a phone number visible on the Contact page, and if so, is it the (not-really-real) Wix number or a real number you would prefer to use? We can also set up a routing layer (call-forwarding) if you want a public-facing number that is not your personal cell.

11. Analytics posture. Do you want visibility into who is visiting the site, which pages they read, what they search for? Cloudflare gives us privacy-respecting basic analytics for free; Google Analytics gives us more at the cost of more data-processing disclosures. I default to Cloudflare Analytics unless you tell me otherwise.

Later — nothing changes if these wait until session 02 or 03

12. Featured commercial partner for the Process page imagery. If we can ride along on one of your real in-flight commissions for build photography, the Process page gets ten times better. Any current project where that would be welcome?

13. Wedding silhouette selector scope. When we bring this online in phase two or three, what is the right shape of the tool — a visual picker (click the silhouette that is closest), a questionnaire (answer six questions), or both? Callie's read is the binding one; this is not a session-01 decision.

14. Shop history. You mentioned a mentor lineage and the origins of the shop on the 17th. If there is a short narrative version of that story you want on the Who-We-Are page, it would be a good addition — but the page works fine without it if you would rather keep that implicit.

15. Newsletter / email capture. Some shops in your register run an occasional newsletter (new portfolio pieces, seasonal offerings). Interested? If yes, we add a footer email-capture and plan a light Mailchimp or Buttondown setup phase-two.

Not a question — just a flag

If any of the read-back in the project-understanding brief is wrong, flag it first. Fixing my understanding is always cheaper than fixing work built on top of wrong understanding.

To Do — items I am drafting in your absence

While we wait for session 01 to start, I am drafting a few items so they are ready to land into the site instead of stalling the build. Each is collapsed below; click to expand. None of these are committed; they all need your read before going live or going out. I am surfacing them here so nothing is happening behind your back.

See you Friday at 11:00.