The glamorous parts of a publishing site are the hero, the cards, and the article pages. The durable parts are quieter: canonical URLs, feeds, sitemaps, descriptions, image alt text, and pages that still make sense without optional scripts.
Those details are not chores. They are distribution features. They help readers share, subscribe, search, and return.
Ship the boring routes
About, contact, 404, message-sent, feed, sitemap, tag, category, and author pages make the site feel complete. They also give editors predictable places to point people.
Keep scripts optional
Search, menus, and progress indicators can improve the experience, but the page should still be navigable without them. Static HTML is the baseline; client JavaScript adds convenience.
