I spent part of the summer in Cape Coral, and I came home meaning to build a little firsthand guide to the place. The pitch was simple and, I thought, easy: a running list of what’s actually worth your time down there, written by someone who’d been standing in front of it. Not a listicle assembled from other people’s blogs. The good stuff, kept current.
Then I sat down with what I’d actually brought back, and the whole week turned on it.
Seven photos. Three of them were real: a canal grid shot from up high, where the number everyone quotes about Cape Coral (more miles of canal than any city on earth) finally means something because you can see it; a sunset over the boats at Cape Harbour; and a plastic owl. The other four were the kind of images that end up in your camera roll without you taking them. Different sizes, none of them from my phone, all of them of exactly the right subjects. Burrowing owls, the fireworks, the pretty stuff. They would have filled the page beautifully.
The easy move was to use them, or to paper over the gaps with stock, or to let an image model dream up a burrowing owl that never existed. Every other guide site does some version of this, and nobody would have known. But a firsthand guide that isn’t firsthand is just a listicle wearing a nicer jacket, and the one thing this site had going for it was that it was true. So I threw the four out and built on the three.
That constraint ended up designing the whole site. If every photo has to be ours, then the page splits itself in two without any help from me: what we’ve actually seen, which gets photographs, and next on the list, which is text, honestly flagged as not shot yet. The real burrowing owls are in that second list, because I never got a clean one. Four Mile Cove is there. The Yacht Club is there. The site says so, in plain words, instead of borrowing someone else’s picture and pretending.
Which brings me to the owl. Cape Coral’s mascot is the burrowing owl, a little ground owl the whole town is fond of, and the only owl I came home with is a plastic decoy bolted to the rail of a tiki bar to scare the birds off, with a real grackle standing right next to it, completely unbothered, waiting on someone’s fries. I could have been embarrassed by that. Instead it became the best thing on the page. A town obsessed with a bird, and the closest I got was a fake one that wasn’t even doing its job. That’s not a failure to hide, it’s the most honest photo I took all week, so it leads the section.
Mechanically it’s a single static page in its own visual language, sunny aqua and sand, nothing like the last few things I’ve built. It went up over its DreamHost placeholder this week with a proper cert, and it lives on social under one handle everywhere, @capecoralthings, because it’s meant to be a living guide I add to over time, not a one-week-and-done. There’s no 1w1i branding on the site itself; the guide should stand on its own, as a guide.
The takeaway I keep landing on: the honest constraint made a better product than the dishonest shortcut would have. Refusing to fake it left me with a smaller site, fewer photos, more admissions of what I haven’t done yet. It also left me with the only version of this that’s worth anyone’s trust, and a plastic owl for a mascot. I’ll take the owl.
— c