From CyanLabs Prototype to Launch, to Search Indexing
The stretch between "it runs" and "it's live and indexed" — the small details that took CyanLabs from build to launch, and the simple SEO steps that got it into Google and Bing.
The first entry in this build diary covered how the site came into existence from zero. This one is about the second half of the journey: from “it runs” to “it’s presentable, live, and indexed by search engines.” Between those two states sit dozens of small details, plus a little SEO common sense.
The polish before launch
Spoiler first: the gap between “the site runs” and “the site looks like something done with care” is bigger than you’d expect. Before going public, I mostly worked on these things.
Dual skin. The site started as a single dark theme. I reworked the colors into a set of switchable style variables, added a day/night toggle, and dealt with the first-paint flash: the browser remembers the theme you picked last time, so the page opens correctly instead of blinking from light to dark. Button, card and text contrast were all calibrated separately for both skins.
Bilingual version. I added a full English version of the site and translated every post. The language switch in the header maps by current page path, so switching from a Chinese page lands you on its English counterpart instead of throwing you back to the homepage, let alone a 404.
Branding. The wordmark became uppercase CYANLABS, and the favicon got a branded look. I also added an Open Graph preview image, so when someone shares a link in WeChat or Telegram, it shows a card with the brand and title instead of a bare URL.
Mobile navigation. Navigation is where mobile sites usually trip. English labels didn’t fit on one row, and a four-character Chinese label stuck out awkwardly. In the end, mobile collapses into a hamburger menu and desktop shows short centered labels. Both languages behave.
Pillar naming. The four sections finally got consistent names across navigation, homepage cards, and article pages: Chinese pages use “Chinese + English”, English pages keep English only.
Individually, each of these changes is trivial. Together they decide whether a site looks serious. To be honest, polishing all these details burned more tokens than building the site in the first place. But I’d hooked my agent up to a chat app, so I could ask for changes from anywhere: think of a letter-spacing issue on the way home, send a message, and it’s fixed. Watching the site take shape bit by bit turned out to be surprisingly addictive.
Buying a domain and going live
Once development was mostly settled, I bought my own domain. A domain isn’t just a URL. It turned the site from “a project” into “a real place on the internet.”
The code lives on a static hosting platform with automatic builds: every push triggers a rebuild and a release. Change content, verify, commit, push, and the live site is updated within minutes, no manual uploading. Publishing became a very light operation.
Getting indexed by Google and Bing
Going live doesn’t mean getting found. New sites don’t show up in search results on their own; you have to go knock on the door. The SEO I did comes down to three things.
Help crawlers find you. A sitemap lists every page on the site so engines can fetch them all at once. robots.txt explicitly allows crawling and points to the sitemap.
Make content worth indexing. Every page has a clear title and description. Canonical URLs prevent the bilingual versions from being treated as duplicates, and the share card makes outbound links look better. The English version is SEO in itself: the same content gains a second entry point and can rank in English searches.
Submit proactively. After verifying ownership in Google Search Console, I submitted the sitemap and used “URL Inspection” to request indexing. For Bing, I imported everything from Google in one click and the sitemap synced over automatically.
Then it’s a waiting game. Google confirms the submission, but actual indexing usually takes anywhere from a few days to two weeks. New sites all have this settling-in period, so there’s no point being impatient.
Wrapping up
The biggest lesson this time: AI can build things, but “looking polished” and “being found” still come down to taste, details, and a bit of common sense. AI produces a draft. The person is the one who turns it into a piece of work.
The four pillars are slowly filling up with content. I hope this site turns out useful to people passing by, and worth a longer stay.
Website diary series: A video and an old blog post · The 30-minute prototype · The dual-agent method · Launch and indexing