Live Audit #1: Xennex.app, an Indie Software Studio, With Baabs

Products is a subset of Work (same product cards and archive). /products is only linked from the footer, /work from the top navigation. I would consolidate these onto one page, especially considering that /services also exists.

I understand why the privacy policies sit on the xennex.app domain (app store requirements, the LLC as the data controller, API/OAuth verification, and the fact that some products don’t have full websites) and there is a mild SEO side-effect in keeping them there. However, eight privacy policies as a top-level dropdown is unusual. A visitor evaluating the studio for services doesn’t need them in the main navigation. Keep the pages and move them to the footer.

The language of the homepage is fine. Five consumer apps and a download count tell a COO that he can ship. What she wants to know is whether he has built for a company like hers, and whether he’s set up to support her build for the long haul. The client work and the ownership promise answer both, but they sit below the products.

Homepages are the hardest pages to get right, and this one deserves a proper messaging breakdown, not two paragraphs in a technical audit. I’ll resist. The short version is in Step 3.

They look good overall. Two of them, the Buddy Delaune site and Nion Lights (which he co-owns), would fit better in the owned section, so this list is purely client work. Martin Construction, Mindful Solutions NOLA, and Davadi are the three pieces of work that match the ICP most closely, and right now they sit below the consumer apps. I’d move them up.

It offers very little information. It would be more useful to be able to explore a page explaining what these products were and why they were retired. A blog post explains this in part, but my recommendation would be to restructure this section.

I don’t recommend this, even though it feels natural, because people will leave the site without having a chance to convert. I would also create dedicated showcase pages for each project, with explanations of how they were built, unique CTAs, then link out.

• Game Night appears on /work as “Built & owned by XenneX” and again further down on the same page as “Built for others.”
• The hero says “consumer apps with hundreds of thousands of downloads,” while the portfolio as shown has one app at 100K+. I’d either tighten the wording to match or name the apps behind the number.
• The website service page estimate starts at $1.5K, while his ideal-client brief sets the floor at $3K. I’d bring the page in line with the clients he wants.
• The Website service’s FAQ “Will the site rank on Google or show up in AI overviews?” answers Yes. Nobody can fully control rankings, so I’d rephrase this around what he does control: the work done right and reported on honestly. That answer also tends to attract the right kind of client, rather than price shoppers.

The first thing I notice is the images. Considering all the articles are written in the owner’s own voice, I would have loved to see something more real or at least a consistent style. A good example of what works is “The year I stopped patching and started rebuilding.”

I also think some of the articles are written more for fellow builders than for the buyer he wants to reach. Some of them are good indie-hacker content, but a $30M-revenue COO evaluating a $50K build wants to know how to scope a build, what “you own the code” actually means in a contract, how to make a build-vs-buy decision, why cheap freelancer work fails, etc.

The posts have no author or byline connecting the “I” to Buddy Delaune, and the CTA at the bottom of each post links to the homepage rather than to /contact or /estimate. For a site whose realistic play is personal brand and E-E-A-T (Google’s shorthand for experience, expertise, authority and trust, which increasingly ties to a named person), the missing byline is the bigger issue.

In my opinion, the ICP for this service doesn’t use regular conversion paths. They read thought-leadership pieces and follow specialists on platforms like LinkedIn and X. More on this in Step 3.

• The one-time / monthly / show-me-both toggle only highlights one column. I’d remove it unless the choice is sent along with the contact form.
• On the advisory path, the steps are nearly identical to other paths. The advisory should have its own qualifying questions, and each service type might benefit from unique qualifying questions.

/blog/a-decade-of-side-projects sits three clicks deep with a single inlink from one blog post. Fix the link or redirect it to the twelve-years retrospective.

All URL variants (www, non-www, etc.) end up on https://xennex.app, which is what matters. The www redirect is a 307 (a temporary redirect and Vercel’s default). I’d switch it to 308 to consolidate permanently.

Even self-referencing ones. A canonical is a tag that tells Google which URL is the official one when several could serve the same content. On a 61-page site with no URL parameters this isn’t a huge issue, but I recommend adding self-referencing canonicals.

26 of the 38 blog titles run past 60 characters, partly because every title carries the brand name, a suffix that Google often truncates anyway. 31 meta descriptions exceed 160 characters. Meta descriptions do not affect rankings, but persuasive ones can increase CTR. Both minor issues.

The hierarchy is mostly right, but on /work it’s inconsistent within the same page: product cards use H3 under the section H2, client-work cards use H2 for each project name, and the archive goes back to H3. On the semantic side, the headings are written for humans, which I like, but the H1s on the homepage (Software, shipped) and contact page (Let’s build something) don’t say a lot about what the studio does or where.

The crawl makes the internal linking issue concrete. The core pages (services, about, work, contact, estimate) each get about 60 internal links, because they’re in the header and footer of every page.

However, each of the 38 blog posts has exactly one contextual inlink, from the blog index. Almost no posts link to another post, service page, or client project. So the site’s best asset, the writing, is connected to the rest of the site only through navigation and never contextually.

It’s Next’s unstyled default. I would recommend a styled 404 page.

The aggregateRating uses reviewCount: 100000. That’s the download count, not the number of reviews. An easy slip to make, but worth correcting, since Google takes inaccurate ratings markup seriously.

They are web apps (PWAs).

The bigger point is what is missing. Over 80% of pages have no structured data. The only other structured data on the site is FAQPage on the six service pages. There is nothing that tells a search engine or an AI crawler who XenneX is, who Buddy Delaune is, or who writes on the blog.

The homepage and service pages do not have og:image (the preview picture social platforms pull when a link is shared) and use the small “summary” Twitter card, and the About page’s og:url points to the homepage. Sharing the homepage and About page on social media would render them as a gray box. Blog posts are set up almost correctly, except for the images that use the .PNG (non-compressed version of the image) in the incorrect ratio.