32 Islands Off the Map — Two Days Rebuilding the Landing Page

I thought the landing page was fine. It has a hero, screenshots, user reviews, download buttons. While I was busy fixing the app, the landing sat in my mental “done” folder.

Two days ago I ran a full audit for the first time in a while. Counted every page, followed every link, checked what a shared link actually looks like. The results were a little embarrassing.

What the audit found

• We had written 44 guide pages with real care — and the guide hub linked to only 12 of them. The other 32 existed only in the sitemap: islands off the map. Search engines could reach them; humans couldn’t.
• The only screens with a site header and footer were the home page and the blog. All 88 guide pages (KO/EN), the about page, the Public Library, the legal pages — each had a single “← Back” text link. A visitor landing on a guide page from search had no download button and no way anywhere else.
• Sharing a blog post on social media showed no image. The default OG image was an SVG logo, and neither Twitter nor KakaoTalk renders SVG. Over a hundred posts had been going out bare.
• The project name in package.json was still “orbital-orbit” — whatever the Astro starter felt like calling it.

An embarrassing list, but there was a single pattern behind it: we were creating content faster than we were connecting it. The guides and the blog kept piling up while the structure stayed frozen at the first design — from when the site had ten pages.

Connecting

The fixes themselves didn’t take long.

Instead of attaching the header and footer page by page, I built them into the shared layout and made the exceptions (home, the IR deck) opt out. A hundred-odd pages gained navigation without touching a single one of them. The guide hub got a full index of all 44 pages, and the footer grew into a proper sitemap.

The OG image became a PNG fallback. One thing I learned here: social scrapers do not read SVG. Put an SVG in og:image and it fails with no error — quietly, showing nothing. Quiet failures are the scariest kind.

The blog index — 128 posts in one flat list — got grouped by month, and about twenty thousand lines of dead components and starter leftovers got deleted.

Built, then deleted

I also built a headline animation — letters appearing one by one. Gradient text has a trap where splitting and animating characters breaks the clip in Safari, and I carefully engineered around it. Then I looked at it running, and the answer was obvious: motion by itself wasn’t value. A day later I deleted all of it. The code is gone, but the map of traps stays, so I’ve decided to call it even.

Getting visitors to project themselves in

With the structure connected, a harder question remained: when does a visitor actually feel “I want to try this”?

Until now the landing page showed things (screenshots) and explained things (paragraphs). But fecit’s differentiator — one goal unfolding into named spaces for present, hope, obstacle, response rule, retrospect — just looks like a form when shown statically. The value of the structure only appears when you put your own goal into it.

So the “How a single goal unfolds” section became interactive. A 10K run, a certification exam, a quarterly talk, a job change — tap a chip and that goal unfolds into six spaces. The first screen now has a phone mockup running the actual app (a twenty-megabyte simulator recording squeezed down to 516KB), and the hero gained a no-sign-up path into the Public Library.

What I learned

1. Connecting content is harder than creating it. Pages accumulate; if navigation stays frozen at the first design, carefully written content becomes islands off the map.
2. Quiet failures need regular patrols. The SVG OG image never raised an error. You don’t find out how bare your shared links look until you share one yourself.
3. Showing and letting people project themselves in are different things. A feature description gets read and forgotten; someone who just put their own goal into the structure starts imagining the next screen.

You can try the goal chips on the home page. What shape does your goal take, unfolded into six spaces?