ABOUT LODESTAR
What Lodestar is — a marketing-site starter for SMBs
Lodestar is a marketing-website starter for small-to-medium service businesses (5–250 employees) that sell time, expertise, or services. It's optimized for professional services, trades, hospitality, healthcare, real estate, MSP / IT, education, and nonprofits — and intentionally not optimized for full e-commerce, SaaS product sites, or native-mobile-first products. The stack that's right for those is different.
WHY
Every new client build used to be a re-derivation.
Before Lodestar, every new Bytes Unlimited client engagement re-derived the same patterns — the GA4 Consent Mode v2 wiring, the Clarity form-mask convention, the security headers, the schema.org JSON-LD scaffolding, the Astro content-collection setup. Each rebuild was an opportunity to introduce bugs, drift from STANDARDS, or skip an edge case the last build had already solved.
Lodestar collapses that into "you already have it." The patterns live here, configured and working. A new client gets cloned from this starter, fills out src/config/business.ts with their real values, picks which add-ons to enable, and ships in days instead of weeks.
DESIGN PRINCIPLES
What makes Lodestar Lodestar
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Improvements flow down, your work stays put
Security patches, accessibility fixes, and schema tweaks made upstream land in every client site automatically. Your own content and branding are off-limits to the sync — they never get clobbered. (There's a four-tier system under the hood; you never have to think about it.)
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Add-ons that are already built
Analytics, spam protection, video embeds, social-share images — the optional pieces are written and tested once, then switched on with a line of config. Nobody re-wires them from scratch on every new site.
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One rulebook, no "we'll get to it later"
A single STANDARDS file covers security, accessibility, SEO, and performance, and every Lodestar build follows it from the first commit. Skipping the boring-but-important parts isn't an option — they're baked in.
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Static, fast, and cheap to host
No CMS to patch, no database to breach, no server to babysit — just fast static files. A typical small-business site runs on shared hosting plus Cloudflare for under $20 a month.
WHO BUILDS IT
Built and maintained by Bytes Unlimited.
Bytes Unlimited is Anthony Affee's Hudson Valley NY shop — managed IT, security, and web work serving the Hudson Valley regionally and nationwide for remote-delivered engagements. Lodestar is the internal tool that makes the web side of that practice repeatable across every client build.