An Emergency Room
16 symptom triage pages. Pick what you're seeing, like a site that won't load or email landing in spam, get the first things to try, then the full field guide.
← The Herd
★ Case study · Lot No. 05 ★
Web Design Survivalist
A field manual for the day a site breaks.
A free field manual for website emergencies. Plain-language field guides, printable checklists and diagnostic tools help site owners find what broke, fix it step by step, and set things up so it doesn't happen again. We designed it, built it and host it. It launched in November 2026.
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At a glance
- Product
- Web Design Survivalist, a free field manual for website emergencies, for site owners and the designers who look after their sites
- What we did
- Planning, design, every page of the build, the WDS Core plugin and the hosting
- Built with
- Breakdance, plus WDS Core, our own plugin for the content model, the tools and the printable PDFs
- Live site
- webdesignsurvivalist.com ↗
- 138 field guides in plain language
- 16 diagnostic tools, plus a full website checkup
- 26 printables: checklists, client templates and field cards
- 232 glossary terms with hover definitions
The idea
When a site breaks, its owner needs a calm answer fast, not ten browser tabs of guesswork.
Most help for a broken website is written for developers or scattered across forums. Web Design Survivalist puts it in one place, in plain language. Pick the symptom, run a check from the outside, and follow a field guide from the first moves to the fix. Then set things up so it doesn't happen again.
It had to work for two crowds: the business owner whose site just went down, and the designers and freelancers who keep their clients' sites alive. So it carries tools and templates for both. It's published by Lone Star Data Ranch, with one short, honest note that we can help if you'd rather hand the problem off.
What we built
A library, a toolkit and a print shop in one WordPress site. Every page is built in Breakdance, and WDS Core, a plugin we wrote for the project, runs the content model, the tools and the printable PDFs.
138 field guides
Step-by-step fixes for WordPress, hosting, DNS, SSL and email, plus 19 cheat sheets and a 232-term glossary whose definitions show on hover.
A website checkup
One domain, one click, plus 16 focused tools: DNS and propagation, SPF, DKIM and DMARC, SSL, redirects, WordPress, ports, speed, blocklists, Google indexability and more. Every lookup is rate limited and locked down, so the tools can't be turned against anyone else's server.
Paper still works
8 one-page Bug-Out Bag checklists, 13 Client Survival Kit templates and 5 field cards, all made to print cleanly on a black and white laser printer.
Kits for designers
A white-label client report, a website owner's manual generator, a care plan cost and profit calculator, and contrast, fluid type and pricing calculators.
Private and accessible
Browser-only tools, like the email header analyzer, never send what you paste anywhere. Every page passes automated WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility scans and is checked for layout at 8 screen widths. Fonts are self-hosted.
On the screen
From panic to a plan
★ Lot No. 06 ★
Got a site that has to work hard?
We plan, design, build and host content sites, web tools and WordPress plugins, then keep them running. Tell us what yours has to do.