The Kootenay List

Every small region has the same dead layer: a chamber directory behind a membership fee, a listings site that died in 2019 and still ranks, and a search engine full of ghosts. When a resident of Trail needs a plumber or a parent in Nelson needs a kids store, the honest answer has been to ask Facebook and hope. That layer is what The Kootenay List replaces.

The data is the product, so the data got built like a product. Thousands of harvested rows were filtered, deduplicated, and hand-checked down to 5,682 businesses that actually exist, across 77 towns and 112 categories. No Google-scraped data anywhere in the build. The consent lanes live in the schema itself: person-shaped listings render only what the business self-published, private contact data never enters the compiled dataset, and an automated gauntlet proves zero email leaks across the build output.

The design refuses the startup-directory look from the first pixel. The concept is the region's living business register: a public record book, so the palette is bone, manila, and kraft paper with record ink and a stamp blue, the type is a civic pairing with a mono voice for the data, and the signature is the living page: a wall of real business names that responds to touch and to typing, every name lifting its own ruled index card. It reads like a public institution because that is the job it is applying for.

Freshness is visible everywhere, and worded carefully. Every record carries the date of its last check, and the site says checked instead of verified on principle: verified is a claim, checked is a fact with a date on it. The header carries the living tally. Closed businesses move to marked history instead of vanishing, because the history is part of the record.

The engineering is deliberately boring in the best way: static output, no database, flat JSON compiled from the master dataset, and a custom search index that makes 5,682 records feel instant. That is why desktop Lighthouse reads 99 performance, 100 accessibility, 100 best practices, 100 SEO with a 0.9 second largest paint, and why the whole thing costs almost nothing to run, which is what free forever requires structurally.

The List is also the studio's proof of maintenance, which is the thing a website client actually worries about. Anyone can open any record and see when it was last checked. A prospect deciding whether I will still care about their site in a year can look at five thousand entries that answer the question with dates.

The launch is a beginning, not a finish line. The claim flow starts the long game of owners maintaining their own records, the statistics page starts the citation loop, and the region-wide category pages start compounding in search. A register earns its authority the same way it earned its data: one checked entry at a time.