# The new site has no sales pitch

> Three years of a WordPress nobody touched, replaced by a static site whose main content is our own handbook: 42 principles anyone can read before applying.

URL: https://onetotem.com/blog/no-sales-pitch/
Lang: en

The old site had been up since 2023. Five pages, three legal notices, and meta descriptions that still read "Add a description for facebook" three years later, because nobody ever filled them in. That was the honest signal. A company that had stopped explaining itself, with a website that agreed.

So the question for the rebuild was not how it should look. It was what it is for. We are not generating leads here: there is no sales team to feed, and a site that ends every page with "let's talk" has decided that your attention is a resource to extract. What we do have is a way of working unusual enough to need explaining, and a hiring problem that is really a self-selection problem.

That is why the middle of this site is the handbook. Forty-two totems, published as pages, each with a number, an edit date, and enough specificity to be wrong. Two references made that decision for us. [37signals](https://37signals.com) numbers its principles and lets long text sit on the page without artifice. [PostHog](https://posthog.com/handbook) publishes its handbook and treats it as a hiring filter rather than transparency theatre: the people who don't fit leave before they apply, and the ones who do arrive with half the contract already signed in their heads.

The design brief asked for three distinct visual directions before anyone wrote a line of code, and it listed the anti-references before the references: parallax heroes, "we craft digital experiences", stock photography of laptops and whiteboards, anything that could belong to any company. The direction that won is the one where typography does the work and every decoration has to justify itself. The mark is still the one from 2022, one per person, [still a canvas](/blog/a-brand-for-us/).

The build is static. Markdown files, Eleventy, no CMS, nothing to log into. What used to be somebody's job to remember is now a script that fails the build: contrast ratios, page weight, alt text, meta descriptions, whether every English page has a Spanish twin. There is even a check that refuses em-dashes in published copy, which tells you roughly how much we trust our own discipline.

The price is real. Publishing is a commit now, and a commit is a build that can say no, so nothing here changes casually. Three years of silence was the alternative, and we have tried that one.

The [handbook](/totems/) is the rest of this. It argues with itself in places. That was the point.