A plain account of how this page has changed and why, newest first. It is one day old, so this is a short record — but a page whose entire argument is that a stranger should be able to check things had better start keeping one on the first day rather than the hundredth.
This is a sample, and says so across the masthead. Bighorn Basin Tree Service does not exist. It was built to show a Washakie County trade what a page of its own could look like.
It exists to solve one problem. A stranger standing in their own yard cannot tell whether the outfit quoting them is insured, and the usual proof is a folded certificate in a glovebox that nobody can check on a Saturday. So the insurance is the first answer on the page, and every line of it links to a check somebody else keeps.
The reader decides how much of it to read. The page opens with the card — name, telephone number, one picture of the work, the insurance with its three checks, the service area — and then everything else, under a band captioned More Info holding three checkboxes: Plain Answers, References, How it Works. All three start checked. Unchecking one takes that part of the page away.
And the page can be held to what it said. Every page here is copied to the Internet Archive, dated. A customer who hires on the strength of the insurance figures above can prove later what those figures were on the day — from a record neither they nor we control.
The rules around it are real — Wyoming’s monopolistic workers’ compensation fund, OSHA’s ten feet from a power line, the arboricultural safety standard, the power company’s free pruning near its own lines. Thirteen sources, all fetched.
Built the day before with all three boxes empty, so the page arrived as the card alone and the reader opted in. Walter, looking at it: “the default should always be visible.” Now reversed — all three start checked, and unchecking takes a part away.
Worth being honest about the cost, because it is the exact thing the split was meant to fix: the page is long again on arrival. What it keeps is the control. A reader who does not want the background can switch it off in one tap, which was not true of the page before the split, and the card is still the first thing on the screen either way.
Three small consequences. The line under the caption had to be turned around — it now reads Uncheck anything you would rather not read, because as little or as much as you like only made sense when the default was nothing. And the rule that lets a footnote re-open a switched-off section needed !important, since the hide rule carries two IDs and would otherwise win the cascade. And the card page had never loaded the class’s Top button — at 197 words there was nothing to scroll back from. It has it now, the same file every other site uses.
Walter, having had the archiving explained twice and then asked which advantage mattered most: “even though i would like to keep the tree service as simple as possible, this looks like a worthwhile thing to mention on it.” He was right, and it cost the card nothing — the whole point of the More Info band is that depth goes underneath.
New answer in column A: What if you change this page after I hire you? The answer is that you could prove it. Every page of this site is copied to the Internet Archive with the date it was taken, held in California by people who have never heard of this company, and nobody here can edit that copy, redate it or take it down. If the coverage figures, the federal employer number or the credential are not the same next spring, the difference is on the record and it is not our record.
The reason it belongs on this page in particular: almost everything on it is a claim about insurance, and a claim about insurance is worth exactly what it is checkable for. A promise that can be quietly edited afterward is not a promise. The page already sends the reader to the State of Wyoming rather than asking to be believed; this extends the same move to the page itself.
Source card 14 is the capture: this page as it actually stood on 26 September 2026, 12:50 UTC. It is the only link on the page that this company could not alter if it wanted to.
The card at the top is untouched — 185 words on load, as before.
Splitting the page in two on the morning of the same day fixed the reading problem and introduced a smaller one: everything behind the card was now somewhere else, reachable only by leaving the page. Walter’s answer put the choice where it belongs, with the reader: “at bottom there is a horizontal area captioned at top More Info, and below, 3 checkboxes across page equally spaced … reader has the choice of getting as little or as much as they like.”
So the card keeps its 197 words and gains a band at the foot of it. Three boxes, equally spaced, labeled Plain Answers, References and How it Works — the three columns, named in plain language rather than by letter. Check one, two or all three; the sections appear underneath in order. Nothing is checked when the page loads.
It is done with checkboxes and no JavaScript at all. A checked box reveals its section through a CSS sibling rule, which means the page behaves the same with scripting switched off, and there is no state to lose. Two smaller things fall out of the same mechanism: a footnote numeral now opens References by itself and lands on the card it points at, and an internal link card opens Plain Answers and unfolds the answer it points into — both from the address bar, both without script.
The wide three-column page is still there, unchanged, named at the bottom of the band. The format now has a short face and a long one on a single address, and the reader turns the dial.
Walter, looking at what had been built: “the page is way, way, way too much to read. It presupposes that everyone will be interested in reading all that background info.” He was right, and the numbers were blunt: column A alone had grown to 1,347 words across nine answers, on top of thirteen source cards and ten technical sections. Nothing had been deleted — the insurance block was intact and still first — but it had become one ninth of one column, which for the person it was built for is the same as losing it.
So the front page is now a card: the name, a telephone number big enough to hit with a thumb, one picture of the work being done, the insurance with its three checks, the service area, and a single quiet link to everything else. 197 words. The full three-column page is still there, unchanged, one tap away at details.html.
This is worth recording as a limit of the format rather than a failure of the page. Three columns are right for a subject with something to be checked at length — an ordinance audit, a grant proposal, a research strand. A tree service has a customer standing in a yard who wants four facts and a telephone number. The format had to learn to show a short face and keep the long one underneath.
The block at the top of the page had no heading; it was simply a box under an answer. It is now labeled One-tap insurance verification, set in the same small lettering the masthead uses, so that what the page is offering is legible before a word of it is read. Walter’s wording, and better than what was there.
The page exists because of something turned up while researching it, which is the right order for these things.
Wyoming runs a monopolistic workers’ compensation fund — the state is the insurer, not a private company — and there is no public lookup where you can type a business name and see whether it is covered. What there is instead is better: any third party can enter a contractor’s federal employer number and their own address, and the State of Wyoming emails them a Certificate of Good Standing covering workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance. It never passes through the contractor’s hands.
That is why this page prints its federal employer number, which trade sites never do. It invites checking, and inviting checking is the whole proposition.
The page also sends work away on purpose. A power line in a tree is the utility’s call, free, with their telephone number given — because OSHA’s rule is ten feet for anyone not qualified for line clearance, and a tree service that takes the job anyway is gambling with somebody else’s life on your property. Turning down the work is more persuasive than any claim on the page.
One deliberate departure from the format, recorded on the page itself: the first answer is open when the page loads. Everywhere else in this family, column A starts folded shut.