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The Utileau network

2026 · Seven production sites

Seven live websites, ninety-six hand-written pages, one npm workspace — and an infrastructure bill of nothing but domain renewals.

The problem

A studio serving contractors, restaurants, manufacturers and price shoppers can't speak to all of them from one site — a roofer and a design-led brand want opposite things. The obvious answer is several sites. The obvious risk is that several thin sites read as a doorway network and get deindexed together.

What I built

  • Seven Next.js apps in a single npm workspace, each statically exported so every page is a plain file with no server and no database at request time.
  • Ninety-six pages, all written rather than templated. City pages were the danger: a set that survives find-and-replace between towns is precisely the pattern that gets a small network penalised, so each one is written from that town's actual housing stock and trade mix.
  • Strict keyword separation so the sites capture different searches instead of cannibalising each other, with the parent site deliberately stripped of anything resembling a brand menu.
  • Per-site deploys on path-filtered GitHub Actions, so touching one app rebuilds only that app.
  • Seven Azure Static Web Apps, Cloudflare DNS, apex domains via CNAME flattening, and managed certificates throughout.

What I took from it

The whole thing runs on free tiers. Seven static web apps, one database, DNS and bot protection — total infrastructure cost is the domain renewals. The constraint made the architecture better rather than worse: with no server to lean on, everything has to be genuinely static, which is also the fastest thing you can serve.

Something similar in mind?

Tell me what it is and when you're free to talk.

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