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_{Day 66/100}

Hey —it’s Tim.

Let me tell you a story.

Last month I redesigned the Penfriend navbar.
Not just a tweak. A full rebuild.
Sleeker. Smarter. Felt like a proper glow-up.
Even said in the newsletter:

Felt proud. Too proud, probably.

I tested it on desktop.
On mobile.
Rotated my phone.
Emptied the cache.
Did the whole geeky dance.

I hit send.

And within 18 minutes, my inbox looked like this:

• “Hey mate, something’s wrong with the menu on iPhone.”

• “Hey, Tim, just FYI, your navbar is… like, gone?”

• “Dude. It’s fcked.”*

29 emails.
1 broken dream.
No mobile nav.

Turns out, one tiny CSS line collapsed the whole thing like a flan in a cupboard.
Worked perfectly in Chrome dev tools. But in the real world?
It was like watching a plastic bag fight the wind.

It’s all fixed now. Go check it out. It even works on mobile this time…

_{I know, a bunch of links are broken. I’m fixing it. I only have so many hours in a day.}

Why does this stuff always break?

Because front-end development is one part creativity, two parts betrayal.

Your local looks good.
Staging looks good.
Then prod hits and suddenly your site’s in 2007 Myspace mode.

You think you’re shipping pixel-perfect design.
But what you’re really shipping is a giant “PLEASE DON’T LOOK AT THIS ON SAFARI.”

When Filler Goes Live: Design Disasters That Make You Question Reality

Let’s talk about the other flavor of frontend failure:

Placeholder content. That accidentally goes live.

• “Hero headline goes here blah blah”

• “Our product does something cool, insert benefit text.”

• “CTA Button Placeholder Text”

You laugh… until it’s your site.

A friend of mine (real story) was running paid traffic to a product launch page.
Hundreds of clicks. Decent CPC.
But conversions were zero.

Why?

The page said:

The designer assumed the copy was coming.
The copywriter assumed the design was final.
And the dev? Shipped it.

$300k in ad spend.
“Insert persuasive headline.”
Absolutely brutal.

Other glorious fails I’ve seen:

• A testimonial block that said:
  “Amazing product! I love it!” – Jane Doe, CEO of [Company Placeholder]

• A product description that literally said:
  “Write something funny here later. Maybe about cheese?”

• A SaaS footer with five social media icons, all linking to Google.com.

• A pricing table where Plan C said “???” and still converted better than Plan B.

So… how do we avoid this?

You don’t.
Not completely.

But you can:

• Use real copy in your mockups. Even if it’s bad.

• Add build-time warnings for placeholder text (shoutout to linter rules or CMS flags).

• Do a “dumb pass” before shipping — look at the page like you’ve never seen it before. (My favourite way of doing this is read from the last word to the first.

• And if you’re really fancy: add a script that fails CI if lorem ipsum makes it to production.

But let’s be honest — you’re going to miss something.
And when you do?
Screenshot it.
Tweet it.
Own it.
Turn it into content.

Embarrassing mistakes are great top-of-funnel.

My rule?

If I can’t laugh at my failures, I haven’t been doing enough cool shit.

Because real builders break stuff.

And broken things make better stories than perfect ones.

✌️ Tim "Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit AAAAAH" Hanson
CMO @Penfriend.ai

Same brain, different platforms: X, Threads, LinkedIn.

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