Builds and improvements that survive their own upgrades.
New builds, feature work, inherited sites, and ongoing maintenance. 10+ years of CS-Cart, front-end to server.
Everything here is handled directly, by the same person you talk to. No account manager relaying requirements, and no split between deciding and building.
Just need one thing fixed? Quick Fix is the faster route for one-off jobs.
Free CS-Cart health check for new clients outside Japan
A written review of where your store actually stands: whether the core has been modified, how risky your next upgrade looks, and what I'd fix first. No charge, and no obligation to hire me afterwards.
Go ahead with the work and you also get $500 off the quoted price, in exchange for a testimonial I can publish once it's finished.
Five spots to start with. I may close this sooner, or open a few more. This page will say which. Testimonials are written after the work is finished, and published with a note that the client received a launch discount.
Does any of this sound familiar?
- No one on the team who can touch CS-Cart
- The current maintainer only fixes issues: no suggestions for improvement
- You want someone who looks beyond design into PHP and add-ons too
- It's a site built by someone else, and it's not clear what might break if you touch it
- You're worried the current implementation will be hard to maintain down the road
- Upgrades keep getting postponed because nobody knows what they'll break
- You'd like the structure itself to be ready for SEO and the AI era
- You want to add features, but can't find someone who really knows CS-Cart
If even one of these rings true, let's talk.
CS-Cart has plenty of situations that don't quite fit a generic web-build approach. Having someone who understands the internals and can take implementation, improvements, and operations together tends to make things move a lot more smoothly.
What I can help with
New builds & launch support
I can help build new EC sites on CS-Cart: initial design, theme implementation, plugging in the features you need, and getting things ready for live operation.
Rather than translating requirements straight into code, I build with an eye on update-ability, operational load, and how easy it'll be to change things later.
Improvements & feature additions
Improvements and new features on an existing CS-Cart site are very welcome.
- Template updates
- Front-end improvements
- Admin-side usability fixes
- Custom feature additions
- Customisation for how your team actually works
- Integrations with external services
- Safe change proposals that respect existing specs
Where a change needs to persist through upgrades, it's built as a proper add-on rather than written over the core.
Ongoing maintenance
Continuous care for a store that keeps running: the accumulated small changes, the improvements nobody has time for, and the upgrades that need doing before they become urgent.
- Ongoing changes and improvements
- Keeping the admin usable as the team's needs change
- Performance work
- Upgrade planning and execution
- Watching for the things that will hurt later
I try not to patch things just to get through today: I want to shape them so future-you isn't stuck.
* For a single fix rather than an ongoing arrangement, Quick Fix fits better.
Taking over work built by others
Taking over CS-Cart sites built by another team is absolutely fine.
The hard part with a handover usually isn't the messiness of the code itself: it's not being able to see what affects what.
I read through the current state, figure out what can be touched safely and how it should really be fixed, and then work through it in stages when that makes sense. These projects reward careful judgment more than flashy work, and that's something I'm good at.
Visibility for the SEO / AI era
Just looking polished doesn't quite cut it anymore. If the structure doesn't communicate clearly to search engines or AI, the information simply won't get picked up as easily as it should.
Some of what we can look at together:
- Getting the information architecture in order
- Revisiting the design of products, categories, articles, and FAQs
- Markup improvements
- Internal navigation and linking
- Implementation direction for search engines and AI
- Laying the groundwork so people can actually find the site
When I say "AI readiness," I don't mean sprinkling buzzwords: I mean implementing things so machines can actually read and understand what's on the site. It's the kind of thing that's easy to miss in a normal build.
Upgrades
Upgrading a CS-Cart site that's been customized over the years is rarely just running the upgrade. What breaks is usually whatever was written over the core or the parent theme, and that's rarely documented.
So the work starts with finding out what's actually there, then deciding what to move somewhere safer before anything is upgraded.
Why work with me
10+ years of hands-on CS-Cart work
Because I've worked with CS-Cart for a long time, I can pick up on points that a typical agency would miss. Templates, admin, extensions, legacy changes, operational quirks: I've learned them on the job.
It's less about the years themselves and more about being able to anticipate the unexpected. That's what builds up.
Directly involved, from front-end to back-end
There's no split between "the person you talk to" and "the person doing the work." The same person who understands your situation also designs and builds it.
- Conversations move quickly
- Fewer crossed wires
- No telephone-game translations
- What's technically not feasible can be flagged up-front
Staged work, not "rebuild everything"
What most teams actually want isn't a rebuild. It's realistically improving the parts that are hurting right now, without stopping the store to do it.
Work can run in stages, in whatever order makes business sense, rather than as one large project that has to land all at once.
Not "ship and leave": implementations that don't break operations
Short-term-only implementations tend to come back as debt. So I design with future updates, maintenance, and additions in mind, not just today.
- Will this be easy to work with later?
- Will the operations team get stuck?
- Am I adding unnecessary complexity?
- Is this a stopgap?
I keep these in mind while working.
Thinking beyond the surface: into structure
An EC site isn't just design, and it isn't just features. Presentation, navigation, update-ability, findability, and how information comes across all need to be considered together.
So rather than treating this as pure coding work, I propose how to design so it's easier to operate, easier to communicate, and easier to improve over time.
Common reasons people get in touch
- Take over a CS-Cart site built by another team
- Want to add features but don't know who to ask
- Want to improve an existing site bit by bit
- Want one person to handle both front-end and back-end
- The admin / content management is hard to use
- An upgrade is overdue and nobody's confident about running it
- Want to improve with SEO and the AI era in mind
- Thinking about a new build: want to talk it through first
Scope of work
How we'll work together
- Get in touch: share where things are right now and what you're hoping for. A rough outline is fine.
- Review together: if needed, we'll work through the current challenges, what you want to achieve, and what's most important.
- Proposal & estimate: scope, approach, and effort, put together as a proposal.
- Implementation & review: depending on the work, we move through changes, implementation, and checks.
- Delivery / ongoing support: one-off engagements and continuous improvements or maintenance are both fine.
FAQ
Can I come to you with just a small fix?
Yes, though Quick Fix is the better starting point for that: it's set up for one-off jobs, with no minimum size and no ongoing commitment.
This page is for work that runs as a project: builds, staged improvements, handovers, and continuing maintenance.
Can you work on a CS-Cart site built by another team?
Yes. I'll review the current state of the implementation first, then suggest what can be done and how best to proceed.
Do you mostly do new builds, or improvements to existing sites?
Either works, but improvements, feature additions, and maintenance on existing sites tend to be where I fit particularly well.
Can we talk without a design being ready?
Of course. I can help from requirements-gathering and planning the approach.
Can we also talk about implementation with SEO / AI in mind?
Yes, absolutely. Beyond look and features, we can also think through information structure and markup together.
What I care about
If the goal were just to turn requirements into code, there are cheaper and faster ways to do it. But if that ends up making operations painful or hard to fix later, it usually turns out to be a bad deal.
So I prioritise implementations that stay easy to live with, not just ones that happen to run today.
And rather than agreeing to whatever looks easy, I'd rather be honest about the difficult parts and work out a realistic landing point together.
Not sure who to ask about CS-Cart?
New builds, improvements, feature additions, maintenance, handovers: we can even start from just sorting out the current situation. Let's figure out the right next step together.