Last month a client emailed me a change request on a Tuesday. It was a small thing — update a heading, swap an image. The kind of thing that takes five minutes to do and three weeks to forget about.
I didn’t forget about it. But only because I happened to scroll back through that thread on Friday and spotted it. That’s not a system. That’s luck. And luck doesn’t scale.
The Problem with Email
Email is where change requests go to die. Not because anyone is careless — because email wasn’t designed for it. A request arrives between a supplier invoice and a newsletter notification. You read it, you mean to action it, and then three more things arrive on top of it. By Thursday you’ve mentally filed it as “done” because you remember reading it. But reading isn’t doing.
I’ve been doing this for twenty-six years. The requests I’ve missed weren’t the big ones. They were the small ones that felt too simple to write down.
Every web professional has this problem. Every client has experienced it. You send an email saying “can you change the phone number on the contact page” and two weeks later you check the site and it’s still the old number. Nobody dropped the ball deliberately. The ball was never picked up — it was sitting in an inbox, marked as read, assumed actioned.
What I Built
I’ve built a ticket system into my workflow. Not a helpdesk with a login portal and a knowledge base and a chatbot — those are solutions to problems I don’t have. This is simpler than that.
When you email me a change request, it gets logged as a ticket. Every ticket has a status: new, in progress, on hold, or done. I can see every open request across every client on one board. Nothing hides in an email thread. Nothing gets marked as read and forgotten.
If it’s been asked for, it exists as a ticket. If it exists as a ticket, it gets done or it gets a reason why not.
The system also reads my inbox and flags emails from clients that haven’t been turned into tickets yet. So even if I read your email and get distracted before logging it, the system catches it and says: “this person asked you for something and you haven’t actioned it.”
Why This Matters
For a solo website design operator, this is the difference between professional and amateur. An agency has account managers, project managers, ticketing systems, Slack channels — layers of people whose job is to make sure nothing falls through. I don’t have those layers. I have one person and the infrastructure around that person has to be better than average, not worse.
What changes for you
Nothing about how you contact me changes. You still email me, you still call me, you still send a WhatsApp at 9pm on a Sunday if that’s when you think of it. The difference is what happens on my end. Every request is logged. Every request is tracked. And if something is taking longer than expected, I can tell you exactly where it stands — not “I think I saw that email” but “ticket 42, logged Tuesday, in progress, deploying Friday.”
The Thread
This is the fifth week on the same theme. Week 10: knowing what to work on first. Week 11: removing the friction between you and your tools. Week 12: knowing what changed on your site. This week: making sure nothing gets lost between your email and the finished work.
Four weeks. One argument. The businesses that deliver aren’t the ones with the best intentions. They’re the ones where the infrastructure makes dropping the ball impossible.
Tony Cooper
We Build Stores
tony.cooper@webuildstores.co.uk
07963 242210
P.S. If you’ve emailed me something recently and you’re not sure whether it landed — it did. It’s a ticket now. But if you want to check, just ask. I can tell you the ticket number.
