Everything Windrow can do now

Your site will not publish a page that fails an accessibility check. Not a warning you can click past, not a score in a report: a gate that holds the page in draft until it passes.

That is the one promise Windrow started with. If you run a clinic, a school, a council, a nonprofit, or an agency building sites for all four, everything below is what that promise turned into. It is also a list of things we will not do, which is the more useful half. Here is the honest state of the product, August 2026.

The gate is still the product

Every page passes a real WCAG 2.2 AA check before it goes live. Not a badge, not a scanner report you can ignore: a gate. If the check cannot run, the page does not publish. That covers the obvious things (alt text, labels, heading order, contrast) and the things most tools never look at: whether the page reflows at 320 pixels without sideways scrolling, whether it survives a reader's own text-spacing overrides, whether the focus indicator is actually visible on every background it lands on.

Themes are checked at build time too. Every color pairing in every theme is proven against the contrast math before it ships, in light mode and dark mode, so there is no combination of choices an author can make that produces unreadable text. When our own tests found a gap (links on one background in two themes), the gate grew a new rule the same day.

Your site also carries an accessibility statement that writes itself from what was actually checked, and it never claims a success criterion the checks cannot establish. Honesty over decoration.

The check now arrives with answers

A list of problems is not help. Anyone who has opened an accessibility report knows the feeling: forty findings, no idea which matter, and every one of them written for somebody else.

So the checking now runs in the background and brings you decisions instead. When it finds something worth your attention, a card appears on your site's dashboard with the fix already worked out: here is what is wrong, here is what we would change, here is the other option, and here is what happens if you would rather leave it. You pick one and it is done.

The judgement is in what does not reach you. A single obviously safe fix applies itself rather than interrupting you to ask. Minor findings stay in the report where they belong. Forty cards would have failed at exactly the same job the forty-item report fails at, so a site with three hundred findings shows you a handful of real decisions.

Two things it will not do. It will not let you dismiss something that blocks publishing, because that is what the gate already means. And it never acts on anything you did not choose: the fix a card offers is computed before you see it, so clicking cannot make something else happen.

Writing feels like writing now

The editor grew up this year. You type directly on the page: click into a heading or a paragraph on the canvas and write, with formatting and links right there. Drag blocks to reorder them. Turn one block into another (a paragraph into a quote, a feature list into cards) and if the conversion would lose anything, it tells you what before it does it.

There are 50 blocks, from heroes and galleries to pricing tables, forms, maps that load only when a reader asks, and videos that never phone home on page load. Every block earns its place by passing the same checks as everything else.

A real blog, at a real address

Posts live under /blog, with categories, tags, archives, and an RSS feed. Prefer /news or /notes? Rename it in one setting and every old address forwards automatically. Nothing you have ever shared breaks: old links answer with a permanent redirect, not a 404.

Posts can publish themselves, too. Schedule one for Tuesday at 9 a.m. and it goes through the same accessibility gate at that moment. If it fails, it does not publish, and you get an email instead of a silent surprise.

Your pages now explain themselves to machines

Search engines and AI assistants read a hidden description of what a page is. Most sites either have none or have one somebody typed by hand a year ago that no longer matches the page.

Windrow writes it from what your page already says. A post is described as an article, with its author, its dates, and the trail back to your blog. An event carries its date, its venue and whether it was cancelled. A job carries its deadline. A service, a staff profile, a location: each described as the thing it actually is, taken from the fields you already filled in. Nothing to maintain, and it cannot fall out of step with the page, because it is the same information.

If your site has one location on it, your business details are published the same way, so an assistant asked "who does this near me" has a real answer rather than a guess pulled out of a paragraph. If you have no location entry, there is a panel where you can type them, and that panel is honest about being the one exception in the whole feature: everything else is derived from your pages, so it cannot disagree with them, and this one can.

Every page that a visitor can reach also carries a proper share preview now, including collection pages. Sharing a service or an event used to produce a blank card. It does not any more.

What we refuse to describe

This is where the interesting decisions are.

We will never mark up reviews or star ratings you collected and published about yourself. Search engines do not count them, and marking them up can get a site penalised. The information is sitting right there in your testimonials and the answer is still no. There is no setting for it, because a setting would suggest there is a case.

We will not publish your opening hours as machine-readable fact, because they are free text and "Closed Sundays except by appointment" cannot be turned into data without guessing. A wrong opening time published as a fact is worse than no opening time at all.

FAQ and step-by-step markup are offered, and switched off. Google stopped showing both in search results, so turning them on will almost certainly not change how you appear there. It does help AI assistants read your answers as answers, and the panel says exactly that, so the choice is yours and made with the real reason in front of you.

Pages that should never be in search results are now kept out of them: your search results page, your 404, a coming-soon holder. Those were quietly indexable before, which is the sort of thing nobody notices until a search engine shows somebody your error page.

Newsletters without the trackers

Readers can subscribe on any page. Every signup is confirmed by email before it counts, every message carries a one-click unsubscribe, and the emails themselves pass an accessibility check before a single one is sent.

Here is the part almost nobody else will say: we do not know who opens these emails, and we never will. No tracking pixels, no rewritten links. You see delivery problems (bounces, complaints), never reader behavior. Dead addresses drop automatically so your deliverability stays healthy.

Analytics without surveillance

Every site now has an Insights screen: pageviews, visitors, top pages, referrers, countries, devices. No cookies. No fingerprinting. Nothing stored about any individual, ever. Visitors who send Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control are counted as a pageview and excluded from the visitor math entirely, which is what honoring those signals is supposed to mean.

Visitor counts reset daily on purpose, because we made it mathematically impossible to recognize anyone across days. And since content blockers block our counting too, the dashboard says what every analytics dashboard should: these numbers are an honest floor, not a total.

Sharing without the widgets

Share rows are plain links: Facebook, X, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Email, your device's own share sheet. No third-party scripts load with the page, so nothing tracks your readers before they choose to act. Share cards and social previews are generated properly, so a shared link looks right everywhere.

The rest of a real platform

Custom domains with automatic certificates. Multiple sites per account, with teams and roles. Collections for structured content: events, FAQs, staff pages, podcast episodes with a real podcast feed. Forms with spam protection that does not punish humans. A media library that tracks alt text as a first-class fact. On-site search. Redirects. A trash that lets you restore anything. A preview of any draft, exactly as visitors will see it. Bulk actions, so ten pages can publish in one move, each still passing its own accessibility check. Static export, so your site is never hostage. Site visibility states for staging, coming-soon, and password-protected previews.

And an API with a full set of tools built for AI agents, because we think the next wave of sites gets built in conversation. An assistant connected to Windrow can build pages, upload images, manage collections, schedule posts, and read your analytics. What it cannot do is publish anything inaccessible, because the gate does not care who is asking.

The pattern

Every feature above follows the same rule: the easy path is the accessible, private one, and the product refuses to make the other kind. Share links without trackers. Newsletters without open rates. Analytics without surveillance. Ratings we will not fake. Publishing without exceptions.

That is what Windrow can do now. The refusals are the roadmap.