There's a photo of him at maybe nine years old, standing on the brick coping of a backyard pool with a long-handled skimmer that's almost as tall as he is. He's looking down at the water, focused. A golden retriever is sprawled in the sun on the bricks behind him, half-asleep. The water in the pool is that flat, bright California blue, and you can tell from the way the trees throw their shadows that it's late afternoon, maybe four o'clock, that golden hour where everything looks like a memory before it even happens.
Brent has been cleaning pools since he was nine years old. That photo is from the very first one — his family's pool, his first job, his first dog. He's almost fifty now and he still cleans pools. Same Dana Point neighborhoods. Same skimmer, probably newer model. Different dog.
I came across his website this week and it looked like a website from 2008. White background, blue navigation bar, stock photo of a pool that wasn't his, a phone number that I'm sure works but feels like it might not. None of it told you that the guy who showed up at your house on Wednesdays had been doing this longer than most of his customers had owned their homes. None of it told you about the dog.
So I asked him to send me the photo. The kid with the skimmer, the dog on the bricks. And then I sat down for an afternoon and built him a new website, and put that photo right in the middle of it where you can't miss it.
I spent more time on the typography than I should have. I wanted the word "Always" to feel solid and grounded, the kind of word a pool guy would use, and I wanted "Summer" to feel like the thing summer actually feels like — italic, warm, a little bit golden. I tried about a dozen fonts before I landed on it. None of his customers will ever notice. But I'll know, and Brent will know.
The pool in the hero image is somebody else's pool. I picked it because it had Italian cypress trees in the background and the water had that exact color that pools have in South Orange County in late spring, where the sun is high enough that the bottom looks lit from below. I picked it because it looked like a pool Brent would clean, in a backyard he would visit on a Wednesday, in a neighborhood where he would know the dog's name.
The whole site is one HTML file. No backend, no CMS, no plugins, no admin panel. If Brent never wants me to touch it again, he can hand it to anyone with a text editor and they can keep it running forever. It's the smallest thing I could build that did the job, which I think is most of what good work is — the smallest thing that does the job, made with care.
When I sent him the link he said, "Love it." Two words. That was the whole reply. I don't know if I'll ever build anything that gets a better response than that.
I keep thinking about why this felt good to make. I don't think it was the design or the typography or the part where I figured out the DNS migration without breaking his email. I think it was the photo. The kid on the bricks with the skimmer. The dog. The fact that there was something true sitting on his desktop in a folder somewhere, and all I had to do was find a way to put it where people could see it.
A lot of small businesses have a photo like that. Most of them never end up on the website. Mostly because nobody knows it exists, and even if they did, they wouldn't know what to do with it. Or they'd put it in a corner with a caption like "Our Story" and a paragraph nobody reads.
Put it big. In the middle. With the dog visible. Let the kid have his moment.
That's the whole job, really.
Check out his new site!
T Terri Laguna Beach