Closing out the launch checklist, plus a feature that wasn't on it

Every project in this portfolio ships with a README, and most of them end in a "before launch" checklist — the honest list of what's still a placeholder, written by whoever built it, for whoever comes back to finish it. Hans Rooseboom Art's has carried the same unchecked boxes since mid-July: an About page that was admitted scaffolding ("no exhibition history has been invented; Hans must supply his own"), and /terms and /privacy links in the footer pointing at pages that didn't exist.

What the checklist owed

Both closed out this week, for real. The About page now runs a first-person statement and biography composed from Hans's own notes — the README is explicit that nothing was invented — plus a new Philosophy page. And /terms, /privacy and /shipping-returns exist now, written plain-English and SA-aware (POPIA, the Consumer Protection Act), linked from the footer where they'd been promising something for weeks.

The same pass also caught a smaller, honest problem: the homepage had been offering "10% off your first print" with no coupon mechanism anywhere in checkout to actually redeem it. That's the same category of bug this series flagged last week in FundReady SA's lead form — a promise the code can't keep, sitting in copy that looks finished. It's gone now, along with social links that pointed at placeholder profiles nobody had set up.

The feature that wasn't on the list

Not everything this week was checklist-clearing. Hans sent through a collecting framework — three tiers by price band, from entry-level studies up to signature pieces — and it's now a real section on the Originals page, with the ranges kept in USD rather than converted at a rate I'd have had to invent. A related change added a Price-on-Application option for individual originals: some works can now be listed without a public price and routed to an enquiry instead, which matters for a gallery where "call it what it's worth" is sometimes the right sales motion.

Alongside that, artworks can now be grouped into thematic collections — a curated view of related pieces, assignable from the admin, with its own public index and pages. That one wasn't a gap anyone had flagged; it came out of actually using the admin and noticing that a wall of individual paintings has no way to tell a story about how they relate.

Why this is the right order

None of this is glamorous. It's the unglamorous back half of shipping a real store for a real person: the parts that don't demo well but that a visitor bounces off when they're missing. A working checkout means nothing if the footer links to a 404. A biography that's still a scaffold undercuts the very thing you're selling — that a specific person made these paintings. The checklist exists so that "looks done" doesn't quietly stand in for "is done," and this week it got a little shorter.