Three days, and the slow part was photography
A clinic site built brief to live in three days across thirty commits, around the booking system the clinic already used, with every account created in the owner's name from day one.
Client: a skin and body clinic in Perth, Western Australia. Named here once written consent is given; until then the work is described without identifying the business.
Brief to live site in three days, thirty commits. The speed is not the interesting part.
Two decisions did more for this client than the build did. First, the booking system they already used stayed exactly where it was. No migration, no retraining, no week of staff being slower than before. A new site that forces a working process to change is charging the client for disruption and calling it an upgrade.
Second, every account created for the site was created in the owner's name from the first day: the transactional email, the newsletter, the domain records. Not created in ours and handed over later, which is where handovers go wrong, because the version that gets handed over is always missing the one credential nobody remembered.
There is a written register of every asset the build touches, who holds it today, and how it ends in the client's name. The test is not whether she can operate the stack alone. It is that she could replace me tomorrow without losing anything.
The genuinely slow step was waiting for photographs.