attentionoptimization.com is now on EmDash. What the cutover actually involved.

On August 31 attentionoptimization.com moved to EmDash. Attention Optimization is our AI-era search visibility service. The old site was static Astro on Cloudflare Pages. The new one runs EmDash 0.31.1 on Astro 7, on Cloudflare Workers with D1 and R2. This note covers what the cutover involved, including the parts that went wrong first.

Thirteen routes, no lost URLs

The new site has 13 indexable routes: home, services, how it works, ecommerce, pricing, request, contact, the insights hub, one pillar article, two articles, privacy and terms.

Every old URL was kept or redirected. Existing pages kept their addresses, with trailing-slash canonicals. Two old paths moved: /ai-search-visibility-agency/ and the old /blog/* URLs now 301 to their new homes. Nobody arriving from an old link or an old search result hits a dead end.

The first design was rejected

On August 30 Peter looked at the first build and rejected it. His notes: images awful, margins bad. Fair.

So we audited it properly, across 14 routes at 9 breakpoints. The audit found 39 issues. The worst two were a mobile menu where 2 of the 5 destinations could not be reached, and three pages that scrolled sideways at every width.

After the rework, the build passed all 9 of our design gates, with zero horizontal scroll across 126 route and breakpoint combinations and a layout shift score of 0.001 in development.

The accessibility pass changed the call-to-action colour to #B0562F, which gives 4.98:1 contrast against white. The old colour, #C2603D, gave 4.17:1 and failed WCAG AA. Control borders, which had a contrast of 1.31:1, moved to #8E8471.

Typography instead of stock imagery

We tried generating images. Adobe Firefly went 0 for more than 24 attempts across two art directions under this brand’s constraints. Rather than ship weak images, the site went typographic-first, with 7 hand-built diagrams doing the explaining.

Decisions a buyer can check

Some choices on this site are about trust. There are no case studies and no testimonials, because no client proof exists yet and we will not invent it. The old “Diagnostic” offer was retired; the service is $4,999 a month, month to month. And every page that makes a claim carries visible FAQ text that matches its JSON-LD, so what the page tells a person and what it tells a machine are the same thing.

The cutover itself

The cutover was short:

1. Delete the apex and www CNAME records pointing at the Pages project, recording their values first as the rollback.
2. Attach both hostnames to the Worker as custom domains.
3. Flip the site’s INDEXABLE switch to true.

The mail records, MX and TXT, were not touched. Then we checked from the outside. The apex returned 200 with build ID 8bc0272dba96 in the response headers, www redirected (301) to the apex, and the sitemap listed 13 URLs. The conformance gate came back clean: zero failures, zero waivers, one trivial warning. No site console errors in production.

Rollback is re-pointing two CNAMEs. The old Pages project is still there, untouched.

The gotcha that blocked a deploy

One problem cost us time on the day. An invalid CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN was sitting in a shell environment. Wrangler used it in preference to a working OAuth login, and it broke both a D1 import and a deploy.

If Wrangler starts failing authentication for no reason you can see, check your environment variables before you check your login. A leftover token outranks the login you just did.

What we would repeat

Most of the risk in this move was in the design and the redirects, not the switch itself. By the time DNS changed, the URL map was done, the gate was clean on preview, and the rollback values were written down. That is why the cutover could be three steps.

What this means if you hire us

This is what a cutover looks like on our side: URLs mapped before anything moves, the old site kept warm, a rollback that is two DNS records, and the result read off the live domain rather than reported from a checklist. The Deal puts those promises in writing, and the free assessment is where yours starts.