Montgomery Landscape
A redesign that kept every ranking URL — plus an instant-quote tool and a field CRM.
1 → 38
pages Google can crawl (July → October 2026)
10 → 1
SEO findings, zero critical
96/100
site health, two monthly snapshots running
Idea → prototype → product · Richmond, Virginia
Mark Does IT.
Websites·Web apps & stores·Business tools·Domains·SEO + AI SEO·Security training·Audit & assessment
You bring the idea. I bring it to life — rapidly. A working prototype in days, then release after release until it's the real thing: a fully functional website or a custom app with Stripe checkout, accounts and admin — built to bring money in, and better every iteration.
- Richmond, VA · remote anywhere
- Prototype in days → product that sells
- You own the code
Montgomery Landscape · montgomerylandscaperva.com
73,000+dogs ranked by name on Coursing Club36 / 0URLs crawled / SEO findings — Montgomery Landscape139 → 0SEO findings — HiveMind Security rebuild1,000original exam questions — Prep for CISA64×32pixel drawing studio — Beekon Light16products migrated with real prices — Hall's Harvest7,774 Bhardware MFA firmware — DapKey10 / 10canonical checks passing — Blended Barbers VA3products with Stripe checkout built in — Hall's Harvest, Prep for CISA, Coursing ClubSince 2021security awareness training — HiveMind Security73,000+dogs ranked by name on Coursing Club36 / 0URLs crawled / SEO findings — Montgomery Landscape139 → 0SEO findings — HiveMind Security rebuild1,000original exam questions — Prep for CISA64×32pixel drawing studio — Beekon Light16products migrated with real prices — Hall's Harvest7,774 Bhardware MFA firmware — DapKey10 / 10canonical checks passing — Blended Barbers VA3products with Stripe checkout built in — Hall's Harvest, Prep for CISA, Coursing ClubSince 2021security awareness training — HiveMind Security
01 — Selected work
Ideas that became real things.
Every screenshot below is the live product, captured this week — not a mockup. Every number is one I can show you the source for.
Blended Barbers VA
From a booking page to a full brand site — two palettes, real footage, bookable from every screen.
1 → 10
pages Google can crawl (September → October 2026)
8 → 2
SEO findings, zero critical
39
client photos screened, stripped and web-sized
Beekon Light
A kid-friendly product site with a built-in 64×32 pixel drawing studio.
23 → 1
SEO findings (September → October 2026)
64×32
LED studio matching the real board
71
automated browser checks per release
Coursing Club
Find any dog's Fast CAT stats by name — 73,000 dogs, 295 breeds, every season since 2016.
73,000+
dogs ranked, searchable by name
295
breeds, seasons 2016–2026
63,000+
ranking records behind the charts
Prep for CISA
1,000 original exam questions that explain every wrong answer — $17, lifetime, works offline.
1,000
original questions, every option explained
150Q / 4h
full exam simulator
$17
lifetime — purchase flow verified end to end in Stripe's sandbox
DapKey
A robotic hand that reveals your two-factor code only after your secret handshake.
7,774 B
of token firmware, minified
10
launch blockers found and tracked in the readiness review
60 s
physical hold required before provisioning
HiveMind Security
Security, as a swarm — the brand behind the awareness training, and a rebuild that fixed 139 SEO findings.
139 → 0
SEO findings, live site vs. rebuild
60 → 7
pages: the bloat gone, every page indexable
2021
founded
Hall's Harvest Apiary
A honey store moved off a paid commerce plan onto Next.js + Stripe — 16 real products, zero crawl findings.
108 → 0
SEO findings, live store vs. rebuild
16
live products migrated with real prices
2
monthly honey subscriptions carried over
RVA Today
Richmond's weather and the James River, as a retro TV channel.
Live
James River gauge, straight from USGS
8h + 7d
forecasts
1
page that behaves like a channel guide
Buckets
A fast React app that search engines saw as an empty page — audited route by route, with the fix list and a pinned baseline to measure against.
16
findings at baseline: 3 critical, 4 high, 9 medium
3
public routes crawled and captured
1.6 KB
of HTML per page — and no body text a crawler can read
Hive Foundry
Designed here. Printed here. Proven here — a one-printer factory with a full production brain.
1
printer, a full production queue
Real
chamber-cam footage only — renders refused on listings
Receipt
pricing from actual filament cost, never a guess
Read the case study
Operating
Also in the lab
Smaller builds, internal tools and experiments — one honest line each.
- Hive SEOThe in-house crawler, auditor and AI-visibility probe behind every SEO number on this site. Multi-tenant, approval-gated, monthly crawls and weekly probes.
- Quantum Badge System ↗A badge-based learning platform with two paths: Security Defender (phishing, social engineering, privacy) and CryptoQuest (wallet security, blockchain basics, NFTs). Live.
- Cybersecurity Education Galaxy ↗A playable cybersecurity training galaxy — steer with the arrow keys between worlds like Privacy Planet and Nibble Nebula, each one a lesson. Live.
- Pawsh Pickup ↗An on-demand pet-waste pickup marketplace: book a same-day pickup, follow the driver on a live map, or switch roles and take the jobs yourself. Live prototype.
- EZ UpKeep ↗An AI-assisted vehicle maintenance tracker: full service history, smart reminders for oil changes and inspections, and a performance-tuning assistant. Live prototype.
- Hive Field CRMA field CRM for a landscaping crew: 2027 capacity engine, Google Sheets portal, calendar and weather fit.
- LawnQuoteA 50-state instant lawn-estimate platform for any landscaping business: address in, measured lawn and priced quote out. In build — ask about early access.
- ISA SimulatorFifteen rubric-graded IS-audit engagements for practicing the actual job, not just the exam.
- DiffingoAn AI résumé builder that diffs your résumé against the job post. Node + Express prototype.
- HiveSightESP32 + mmWave presence radar publishing over MQTT — the Detect function of the home lab.
- Honeybee Health MonitorA Pokémon GO-style beekeeping game prototype.
- Musical NeighborsA multiplayer, Rock Band-style music game prototype.
- Three on the TreeA manual-transmission driving game built around a real 1969 C20.
- Piano PathwayA browser piano tutor that imports MIDI and teaches by phrase.
02 — Before & after
Drag the line. See the difference.
Two client businesses, as they were found and as they are today. Both captures are real: the "before" is the page their customers used to land on, the "after" is live right now.
Before — the previous Wix siteAfter — montgomerylandscaperva.com
Montgomery Landscape
Austin's company had a site that already ranked and a new look everyone loved. Swapping one for the other would have thrown away 33 ranking pages. I ported the redesign onto the live site page by page instead, then kept building tools around the business.
Beforethe previous Wix siteAftermontgomerylandscaperva.com
How it was done
drag or use the arrow keys
Before — the Square booking pageAfter — blendedbarbersva.com
Blended Barbers VA
Jeremy's shop lived on a Square booking page. He wanted a site that matched the craft: his real photos and video, his two brand palettes, a hiring page, and booking kept exactly where his clients already were.
Beforethe Square booking pageAfterblendedbarbersva.com
How it was done
drag or use the arrow keys
Same treatment, my own brands
I practise on my own businesses before I ask a client to trust me with theirs. Both rebuilds are staged and waiting on their cut-over.
HiveMind Security Redesign staged
Before — the current Squarespace siteAfter — the staged rebuild
Hall's Harvest Apiary Rebuild staged
Before — the current Squarespace storeAfter — the staged Next.js + Stripe rebuild
03 — Services
Six ways to turn an idea into IT.
Pick one or stack them. Every engagement starts with a short call and ends with something you own.
01
Custom website design
Designed around your business. Built to rank.Not a template with your logo dropped in. A site designed from your customers' first question backwards, hand-built so it loads fast on a phone in a parking lot, and wired for search from the first commit — titles, canonicals, structured data, sitemaps, image handling, the lot.
- Discovery, sitemap and design direction before anything is built
- Your photos and video prepared properly (sized, stripped, served right)
- Structured data and an SEO baseline crawl on launch day
- A repo or zip you own, deployed to the host you choose
02
Rapid prototyping for business solutions
A working prototype in days — then we keep going until it's the real thing.The quoting tool, the customer portal, the dashboard, the booking flow, the CRM your business actually needs. The prototype is step one, not the product: it's built against real data, shipped as versioned releases you click through, and grown — iteration by iteration — into a fully functional website or custom app with accounts, admin and Stripe checkout, so it can bring money in.
- A clickable, data-backed prototype first; the production tool grows from it
- Payments built in when the tool should earn — Stripe checkout, subscriptions, licences
- Real integrations: maps and parcel data, email, spreadsheets, booking systems
- Versioned, hash-verified releases, a UAT checklist, and a security review before outside users are let in
03
Domain management
DNS, registrar, email and certificates — handled and documented.The unglamorous layer everything depends on. Registrar and DNS audits, apex and www done right with the redirects to match, certificates that renew, and email authentication so your messages land. Every record documented, so nothing is ever a mystery again.
- Registrar and DNS audit with every record explained in plain English
- Apex + www, redirects, SSL — set up or repaired
- Email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) for the domain
- Migration between hosts without downtime or lost pages
Example: traced a client's vanished bare-domain record to a wiped DNS zone and wrote the exact fix — in order, so Google Business Profile could switch over safely.
04
SEO + AI SEO
Rank on Google. Get named by ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity.Technical SEO done in the code, not with a plugin — measured by my own crawler before and after every change. Then the new frontier: when someone asks an AI assistant for a business like yours, does it say your name? We measure that too, with a replayable baseline, and work the listings and content that change the answer.
- Full technical crawl with Hive SEO; fixes applied in your codebase
- Monthly crawls and weekly AI-visibility probes with a written baseline
- Listings, structured data and Google Business Profile alignment
- An approval gate — nothing changes on your site without your OK
A specialty: Replit-hosted React apps that search engines see as empty pages. Four client sites arrived that way — the before/after numbers in the work above are what happened next.
05
Cybersecurity awareness, education & training
Your people are the perimeter. Train them like it.Delivered under HiveMind Security, the cybersecurity education brand I founded in 2021. Security awareness programs your team will actually sit through, simulated phishing that teaches instead of shames, email fraud defense, and policy and compliance guidance from an ISO/IEC 27001 Lead Implementer — as a managed, ongoing program or a one-time workshop.
- Security awareness training, live or on-demand, tailored to your business
- Simulated phishing campaigns with plain-language debriefs
- Email fraud defense: detect, block, respond
- Policy, risk and compliance guidance (ISO 27001, GRC fundamentals)
06
Audit & assessment support
Get audit-ready — and have someone in the room who speaks auditor.I'm a Certified Information Systems Auditor and an ISO/IEC 27001 Lead Implementer who works in governance, risk and compliance by day. For a small business or a growing team that means practical help: a gap assessment against the framework you're being measured on, the evidence and policies pulled together before anyone asks, and a steady hand through the engagement itself — from the request list to the findings response.
- Readiness or gap assessment against ISO/IEC 27001, NIST CSF, SOC 2 or CIS Controls
- Control mapping, evidence inventory, and the policies and procedures you're missing
- Engagement support: walkthrough prep, request-list management, findings and remediation tracking
- Plain-language reporting your leadership can act on
04 — Process
From a blue line on paper to a thing that works.
Five moves. The dashed line is the idea; the solid line is what ships. The whole point is how little distance there is between them.
01
Listen
A short call. What's the idea, who is it for, and what does done look like. If I'm not the right fit, I'll say so.
02
Blueprint
Scope, sitemap or feature list, design direction and a written quote. Blue lines on paper before a single pixel is built.
03
Build
A working prototype in days, then release after release — each one you can click through and react to — until it's the full website, store or app, payments included.
04
Launch
Domain, DNS, SSL, analytics, structured data and a baseline SEO crawl. You own the code and every account.
05
Grow
Monthly SEO and AI-SEO, content, security awareness training, and a standing line to someone who knows your stack.
Rapid is a method, not a shortcut: every release is verified in a real browser, on a real phone width, against real data.Book the first call
What happens when you say yes
Your first week
The groundwork first, so nothing stalls later on a missing logo, photo or login.
-
01
Onboarding call
About 30 minutes: your goals, who your customers are, what "done" looks like, and the access list.
-
02
Your shared Google Drive folder
Set up by me — one place for everything. Originals go in; stripped, web-sized versions come out. Generated content such as blog posts, promo copy and social captions lands in Drafts & approvals for your sign-off before anything is published.
Your business/ ├─ Brand/ — logos, colours, fonts ├─ Photos & video/ — originals ├─ Documents/ — price lists, policies, past materials └─ Drafts & approvals/ — content awaiting your sign-off
-
03
Access checklist
Domain registrar, hosting, Google Business Profile, Search Console, analytics, booking and payment tools — added as a collaborator, never by sharing passwords.
-
04
The baseline, captured
A full crawl and page-by-page saves of your current site before anything changes, so the after can be measured honestly.
-
05
Blueprint, quote, approval gate
A written blueprint and quote, then the rule that holds for the whole engagement: nothing changes on your site or your listings without your OK.
-
06
Versioned releases
From then on, every release arrives with a short note: what changed, and how it was verified.
The engine under the five moves
The HIVE Cycle
Every website and SEO engagement — a client's or my own — runs the same four phases in the same order, and each phase ends with a gate that has to be true before the next one starts. It runs from my own console, so where a project stands is a record, not a feeling.
-
H
Harvest
Capture the before: baseline crawl, every page saved, the numbers we'll be judged against.
GateBaseline pinned
AboveListen + Blueprint
-
I
Improve
Build the better site, in versioned releases you can click through and approve.
GateOwner approved
AboveBuild
-
V
Verify
Prove it all works: deploy confirmed, crawl clean, real browser, real phone width.
GateQA sweep 100% green
AboveLaunch
-
E
Establish
Paper it and hand it over; then monthly crawls, weekly AI-visibility probes and reports.
GateBilled, tagged, live
AboveGrow
33 checkpoints. Nothing is marked done — not the bill, not the handover — until the Verify gate closes.
05 — About
Hi, I'm Mark.
I design and build for my own businesses first — a honey store, a sports-data platform, a local media channel, a security brand — and then for clients who want the same thing: an idea turned into a real, working product without a six-month agency process.
By day I work in cybersecurity and governance, risk and compliance. I'm a Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA, exam passed September 2026) and an ISO/IEC 27001 Lead Implementer, and I founded HiveMind Security in 2021. I build with AI-assisted development and verify everything with automated checks, real browsers and real data — because "rapidly" only matters if it's also accurate.
- Richmond, Virginia
- Founder, HiveMind Security (2021)
- Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA, Sept 2026)
- ISO/IEC 27001 Lead Implementer
- AI-assisted development, human-verified
Toolbox — AI-assisted, human-verified
- Claude Codefor building
- Replitfor hosting and deployment
- GitHubfor version control
- Stripe + Squarefor payments and booking
- Hive SEOmy own crawler, for measurement
- Headless Chromereal-browser checks before anything ships
06 — Questions
Straight answers.
How fast is "rapid"?
Fast enough that you react to a working thing, not a document. Most prototypes are in your hands within days of the blueprint being agreed; full sites and tools move in versioned releases you can test as they land. Exact timing is written into your quote.
Do you only build prototypes?
No — the prototype is where it starts, not where it ends. It becomes the full website, online store or custom app through versioned releases: accounts, admin, Stripe checkout, whatever the business needs to make money from it. Every release is better than the last; that's the point of working this way.
Who owns the code and the accounts?
You do. Every project ships as a repository or zip in your name, deployed to hosting and domains you control. I never hold your domain hostage.
Do you work outside Richmond?
Yes. I'm based in Richmond, Virginia, and work remotely with clients anywhere. Local clients get the option of meeting in person.
What do you need from me to start?
A short call and whatever you already have — a logo, photos, old site, a napkin sketch. On day one you get a shared Google Drive folder (Brand, Photos & video, Documents, Drafts & approvals) so everything has a home. If you have nothing yet, that's fine; the blueprint step exists for exactly that.
Do you use AI to build?
Yes, openly. AI coding tools — Claude Code chiefly — make the first working version fast. Every release is then verified by me with automated checks in real browsers against real data, and you own the result.
Is there ongoing support?
Yes: monthly SEO and AI-SEO programs, domain and DNS management, and security awareness training through HiveMind Security. Or a one-time build with a clean handover — your call.
07 — Start
Have an idea? Let's make it real.
Tell me what you're trying to build or fix. I read every message myself and reply within one business day with next steps — usually a short call.
Emailhallme3@vt.edu
Based inRichmond, Virginia — working with clients anywhere