Week four: Try LFW opens, eight proposals go out, and homecoming at WeWork

A round dark table at WeWork Rosslyn under a pennant banner spelling HOMECOMING: bowls of salads with labeled cards, a basket of rolls, small pumpkins and a stack of paper plates, with office towers through the windows behind. — Homecoming at WeWork Rosslyn, Thursday afternoon.

Every Friday I write down what LFW actually did that week. Week one, week two, week three.

This is week four.

Try LFW is open

The biggest thing this week: Try LFW opened on Monday.

It has six real WordPress sites, built the way LFW builds for clients:

A law firm (fictional)
An accounting firm (fictional)
A government relations firm (fictional)
A state university (fictional)
A community college (fictional)
A copy of WesternLoudoun.com, the local guide I run

Try LFW's professional services section: tabs for Government, Professional services, Higher education and Tourism, and three cards for the fictional firms Carrow Lindqvist LLP (immigration law), Haskett Brandvold LLP (accounting) and Henshaw Tolliver (government relations), each with a preview of its homepage and buttons to edit the site or browse it live. — Three of the sites on Try LFW, each a fictional firm.

Pick one and it opens in the editor, inside your browser tab.

You work as the organization's communications staff would: edit a profile, publish an update, rearrange the homepage.

How it runs

There is no server behind the editor. Each site runs on WordPress Playground, the WordPress project's own way of running WordPress inside a browser.

PHP is compiled to WebAssembly, and the database lives in the tab.

LFW builds a pinned version of Playground and serves it from try.lfw.com itself. The first visit downloads about 16 MB. After that, a site starts in seconds.

That design is also the security model:

The sandbox has no network access.
Plugins cannot be installed.
Nothing you type leaves your browser, and no other visitor sees it.
A reload starts it over.

The fictional law firm, open in the editor. The checklist on the left suggests what to try.

A city to browse

A seventh site, the fictional City of Wrenfield, is there for local government: bill pay, service requests, meetings and an emergency alert across the top. It is live to browse.

The homepage of the fictional City of Wrenfield: a banner saying it is a concept site by LFW, a boil water notice, a search box asking How can we help you today? over a photo of a clock-towered courthouse, and three cards for Pay a bill, Report a problem and Find a meeting. — wrenfield.lfw.com. The courthouse is the Decatur County Courthouse in Greensburg, Indiana, credited on the page.

Why we built them

Buyers ask for past performance: sites you have built for organizations like theirs. That is a fair question.

LFW's motto is "There is no lift too heavy." A buyer has no way to know what that means from a sentence.

So instead of telling them, we show them: a working site in their field that they can open and edit before they ever talk to us.

The homepage of the fictional Dunmere State University: a banner saying it is a concept site by LFW, an example parking notice, audience links for current students, families, faculty and alumni, the headline A public university for the whole valley, and buttons to apply, visit campus and request information. — Dunmere State University, one of the two campus sites.

Eight proposals out

Eight proposals went out this week, more than the first three weeks combined. They went to:

A public university
A public housing authority
A county tourism office
A downtown development authority
A tribal nation's business network
A regional nonprofit
A nonprofit social enterprise
A law firm

Most went through online portals. Two were printed, bound and sent by Priority Mail, and one of those carried a USB drive with the electronic copy, because the buyer asked for both.

Homecoming at WeWork

On Thursday the WeWork in Rosslyn held a homecoming.

The announcement said: "Come bring your crew and your school spirit for a homecoming hangout! Sip on a cold cider and fill up a plate."

The table had chicken, tuna, macaroni, pasta and potato salads. To drink, there was beer and hard cider. That is the table at the top of this post.

I had a cider with tuna, macaroni, pasta and potato salads. On the second plate I swapped the tuna for chicken, to diversify my protein.

Leland at a counter at WeWork Rosslyn, his face reflected in the mirror under a colorful abstract painting, with a plate of pasta and potato salads, a steel cup, a bottle of Angry Orchard hard cider and a laptop in front of him. The laptop screen is blurred. — Me in the mirror, back at the desk with the first plate.

What changed on LFW.com

161 commits this week. Two more changes worth a closer look.

Security and procurement practices, published

The new Trust page puts LFW's security and procurement answers in one place, each document dated and versioned, so a procurement office can read them before it asks:

Information security policy: what LFW protects, where its systems run, how releases are built and backed up.
Access control policy: client accounts in the client's name, sign-in without passwords, and how access is revoked.
Incident response plan: who is told and when, and how a site is restored.
Acceptable use policy: the rules for client data, credentials and AI tools.
Security questionnaire answers: the higher education questionnaire (HECVAT), answered in full.
Accessibility conformance report: how LFW.com measures against WCAG.

The Policies section of the LFW.com Trust page: four cards for the information security policy, access control policy, incident response plan and acceptable use policy, each marked Version 1.0, October 6, 2026, with a Read button. — The four policies on lfw.com/trust.

The client portal moved to its own address, for security

The client portal now lives on its own address, my.lfw.com, instead of lfw.com/portal on the public website. The old address forwards there. A separate address gives it its own walls in the browser:

Your sign-in stays on my.lfw.com. Before, it went along with every request to the public website. Now the browser sends it only to the portal.
The public site cannot look inside. A script running on LFW.com cannot read portal pages, because the browser treats the two addresses as separate origins.

As before, the sign-in travels only over HTTPS, no other LFW address can set or overwrite it, and there is no password to steal: you sign in with a one-time email link or a passkey.

WesternLoudoun.com launched

WesternLoudoun.com went live on Wednesday: an independent guide to the towns, tasting rooms and events of western Loudoun County, from Leesburg to the Blue Ridge, built and run by LFW.

Its directory lists 97 places. This week it added 13 in Round Hill and Hamilton, plus Williams Gap Vineyard.

Every listing is checked once a week and shows the date, so a closed business does not stay up.

Its events come from the towns' and venues' own public calendars and refresh every morning.

You can also edit a copy of it: it is the tourism site on Try LFW.

The WesternLoudoun.com homepage on a deep green background: the headline Where heritage meets the weekend, a line about Leesburg and the towns out to the Blue Ridge, buttons for See this weekend and Browse the towns, a tall photo of vineyard rows looking out over the valley, and a small black-and-white photo of a tree-lined road in Waterford. — The WesternLoudoun.com homepage. Vineyard photograph by John Athayde, CC BY 2.0; Waterford from the Library of Congress.

Next week

More proposals go out.

If you know an organization whose website has nobody looking after it, I would be grateful for the introduction.

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