Salty Sea Bookkeeping
A website move, not a redesign — a Port Alberni bookkeeping practice’s existing site, rebuilt page for page in code and taken off GoDaddy’s Website Builder with every link and inbox intact.
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The Challenge
Caleb and Madeline run Salty Sea Bookkeeping from Port Alberni, keeping the books for small businesses across Canada. Their site lived on GoDaddy’s Website Builder — a monthly subscription for a site that exists only inside the builder. The words, the pages and the family photography were already theirs and already said what they wanted. The job was not a new website. It was the same website, off the subscription, without breaking the links that point at it, the pages already in search results, or the email that runs on the same domain.
The Solution
I rebuilt the site in code, faithfully — the same pages, wording and photography, reproduced rather than improved, so moving it changed the hosting and nothing a visitor can see. The design and the words are theirs; my work was the move. Every original address was kept, down to the builder’s own /about-1 and /contact-us. Then I changed exactly one DNS record at GoDaddy, pointing the domain at the new site and leaving the rest of the zone — their email included — exactly as it was. HTTPS was live within minutes, the copy stayed out of search until the domain actually answered from it, and the builder subscription could then be cancelled with nothing for their visitors to notice.
What the Move Involved
- A page-for-page rebuild of the original Website Builder site on a clean Astro codebase — content, structure and photography reproduced as they were, so the move changed the hosting and nothing a visitor can see.
- Every original URL kept, including the builder’s own /about-1 and /contact-us, so links already out in the world and pages already in search results still land where they did.
- A one-record DNS cutover: only the domain’s website record moved to Netlify, and the rest of GoDaddy’s zone — their Outlook email records included — was left untouched, with a full snapshot of it kept for rollback.
- An indexing gate that kept the rebuilt copy out of search engines until the domain resolved to it, so it could never be indexed as a duplicate of the live site under a netlify.app address — then opened the same night.
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