Sign-up, rebuilt

It demanded ten characters but never said so until after you pressed the button — and then it wiped the form and made you start again. Now it tells you the rule before you type, checks it as you go, and nothing you have entered is ever cleared when something is wrong.

The rule itself is easier: six characters with one symbol in it, so bbq2go! is fine. While fixing it I found the brief form did something worse — a bad password there threw away the entire enquiry, three pages of event details, and showed a blank error page. That is gone too.

There were two ways to list a business: a short one and an eighteen-question one that asked for your travel radius, guest range, minimum spend, maximum budget and a full description before you even had an account. Every button on the site pointed at the long one.

The long form is gone. What is left is six questions and a password. Everything else you fill in afterwards, on your own listing page, when it suits you. The old web address still works — it just takes you to the short form now.

You used to type your town into a box. Now you give a postcode and we work the town out from it.

The reason is not tidiness. The travel radius never actually worked. The old system knew the location of twenty towns by name and nothing else — so a caterer in Bridgwater, Salisbury, Yeovil or Plymouth could not be placed at all, and was sent briefs regardless of distance. Real coordinates now, real distances.

This is the one I would push back on if I were you, so here it is plainly. Before today, being too far away only lowered your score — it did not rule you out. A caterer in Plymouth with a thirty-mile limit still scored 75 out of 100 for a job in Bristol, because the food, the guest numbers and the budget all matched and the distance was only worth twenty points.

Now, if a job is outside the radius you set, you do not see it at all. It is your own stated limit, so you have already said no. Which makes the number you put in that box matter — set it honestly, and revisit it if you would travel further for the right job.

It used to be an empty box you typed into. Forty-four listings had written it thirty-five different ways — “BBQ”, “BBQ and hog roast”, “Barbecue, smoked meats, hog roast” — which is impossible to match on reliably.

It is now 36 options in nine groups, tick as many as apply. Building it against the caterers already listed showed four of them had no home in the list at all, so Korean, Vietnamese and Taiwanese & Bao were added, along with Bar & Cocktails, Afternoon Tea and Canapés & Fine Dining. This is the list I most want you to pull apart.

You asked about the service list last time. It stays — but it is doing a different job from the new one. Services are the format (food van, hog roast, mobile bar, waiting staff). Cuisines are the food (Korean, pizza, seafood).

They were tangled together before, which is why the categories read oddly. A food van can be Korean or it can be burgers; those are two facts about you, and a customer might want either or both. Both are matched separately now.

They are no longer asked at sign-up — they are on your listing page instead. They still count for matching, and they still stop you being sent a 300-cover wedding when you do 40-cover street food, so it is worth setting them properly once you are in.

Until you do, a new listing is set deliberately wide (10 to 500 guests, no minimum) so you are matched to too much rather than to nothing.

Thirty-six tick boxes down the page was a lot to scroll past, particularly on a phone. It is now a single box that says Select what you cook, opens when you tap it, and has a filter you can type into — type “kor” and you get Korean. Pick as many as you like; it closes when you tap away, not after every choice.

Two things kept deliberately: your picks are still stored as proper categories against your listing, so the matching reads them directly rather than guessing from a sentence — and if your phone blocks scripts, the box simply stays open as the plain list it was. Nothing about your listing depends on the fancy version working.

The same control is on your listing page for what you cook and how you serve it.

Ten places said “Bristol, Bath and the South West” — the front page, the footer, the about page, the page titles Google reads, and the structured data that tells search engines where we operate. All of it now says the UK.

Worth saying plainly: the copy was the easy half. The postcode work means it genuinely handles anywhere — a Leeds postcode was tested and placed correctly. But the caterers currently listed are still invented ones in South West towns, so the browse page still looks regional until real businesses from elsewhere sign up. Brand West's own address stays Bristol, because that is where it actually is.

Reported after the rest of today's work went live, and worth writing down because of how it hid. Pressing Sign Out on the front page gave an error — “this form expired” — and left you logged in. On every other page it worked perfectly. It had been like that since the site was rebuilt; it was not something that broke today.

Sign Out is a button that has to prove the click came from our own page, and the front page was the one page not handing it the proof. Fixed, and while checking it I found signing out did not tell you it had worked either — the header just quietly changed. It now says “Signed out.”

The uncomfortable part: 113 automated checks were passing. They signed out by talking to the server directly instead of pressing the button, so they tested the wrong thing. The checks now press the button, and separately confirm that all 84 pages you can be signed in on carry a working one.