What a travel booking system has to do behind the trip page
A traveller sees the trip page. A tour operator runs on what sits behind it: departures, group prices, payments and where each enquiry came from.
Pravash Karki3 min read
Insights
Notes for teams choosing who builds their software.
LastDoor designs and builds websites and products for enterprise teams and venture-backed startups. These notes are what the work has taught us: how to judge it, what to ask, and what to change first.
A running site gives a design system its starting point
A design system for a site already in use starts from what is live. A before and after of each part is the case for every change.
A research participant portal that protects participants first
A research registry serves volunteers and researchers. The volunteers come first, and every request for their data goes past people and onto the record.
Legacy software redesign: change the controls first, then the tasks
TraqIT's event software had run since 1998. A first release changed the controls on the layout users knew; the task-based design came second.
How to choose a software development partner for years of work
A proposal shows the first three months. A partner's longest engagement, and who owned what in it, shows the years after.
Refactor or rewrite a website people already use? How to decide
Three running products we changed one part at a time, the signs that a full rewrite is the better call, and five questions to decide it.
A research project website has to outlive its grant
A research project's website keeps answering after the funding ends, so it is built around the parts of the programme that last.
Agree the user's path before anyone draws a screen
We drew three layouts too early. Now we agree the user's path, with every branch, before anyone opens a design file.
Change your hotel booking engine without rebuilding the website
A hotel booking engine sits behind a date picker and a button on each room. Change those parts, and the rooms, pages and addresses stay as they are.
A rebranding checklist for the mark, the print and the website
A brand can lose consistency between logo, print and website. A checklist for each, from a project where one team held all three.
WCAG 2.2: what changed from 2.1, and what a machine can test
WCAG 2.2 adds six criteria at levels A and AA. Our automated checks cover target size; manual testing is needed across the new requirements.
PHP 8.2 end of life: what to do before 31 December
After 31 December 2026, PHP 8.2 loses upstream security fixes. Moving to a supported version depends on compatibility, verification and someone owning the change.
Async Communication with an outside development team, from 16 years of tickets
How Anchor Wave and LastDoor kept thousands of jobs moving for sixteen years in writing, with fewer than five meetings a year and a record of each job.
What a VPAT tells you and what to check before trusting it
An accessibility report records a supplier's claims. Its value depends on the testing, scope and limits behind them.
What a retired inquiry chatbot taught us about guardrails
A retired enquiry chatbot left useful lessons about human handover, failure handling and the gaps a checklist can hide.
