04Web Development

Most of your home page is not your home page.

Two point four megabytes arrived before a single word anybody wrote did, and sixty-two percent of that was a tag manager nobody had opened in a year. The person deciding whether to call you is outdoors, one-handed, on a mid-range Android, and none of that was built for them. This is the work of building it for them instead: static where it can be, measured on the hardware they actually hold, and under a weight budget the build refuses to exceed.

Enquiry form completions rose 34% in the ninety days after that launch. Nothing about the offer changed in those ninety days. The page simply finished loading before the person gave up on it.

What the work is

Six things, and what each one actually gets you.

Custom website development

Statically rendered pages, with no client framework shipped to anything a stranger lands on. The interactive parts stay interactive. The twelve pages that are words and pictures stop downloading a framework in order to draw words and pictures.

Responsive design

Judged on a mid-range Android over a throttled connection rather than on the laptop it was built on. Almost every site is fast on the machine that made it, which is the one machine whose opinion does not count.

CMS websites

Sanity, or plain Markdown in your own repository. Your call, both are fine. Either way a non-developer can change copy without raising a ticket, and neither can be turned into a licence you have to keep paying.

E-commerce

Catalogue, checkout, and the tax and shipping rules that actually apply to where you ship. Usually Shopify or Stripe behind your own front end, so the storefront is yours and the payment compliance is somebody else's problem.

SEO and analytics

Titles, structured data and a sitemap that match what is really on the site. Analytics loads after the page is usable rather than before it, because on the last site we replaced the tag manager outweighed everything the client had actually written.

Accessibility and compliance

WCAG 2.2 AA, checked in CI on every pull request rather than audited once at launch and quietly drifting after. Keyboard order, contrast and focus are part of the build, not a remediation project in year two.

What it costs and how it runs

$9,000 to $24,000 to build, and you own it.

Build	$9,000 to $24,000 depending on page count, fixed price
Running	$0 to $40 a month on Vercel or Cloudflare, on your own account
Us, after	$0. No retainer and no licence. Maintenance exists and is optional
Not included	Photography, copywriting and stock licences. We will tell you which you need before you commit to anything

Week 1

We measure what you already have

A waterfall of the current site on real hardware, so the target is a number rather than an adjective. Occasionally the finding is that the site is fine and the copy is the problem, and we say so before anyone has spent anything.

Weeks 2 to 5

Built against a budget the build enforces

The pipeline fails over 120KB of JavaScript on any route, and on any WCAG 2.2 AA violation. Nobody has to remember to check, and nobody can quietly approve an exception at five on a Friday.

Week 6

Launched, with the numbers published

The before and after waterfall goes into the handover next to the repository, which has been in your organisation since week one. If you stop working with us the site does not stop.

Questions about this one

The ones that decide it.

Why not just use WordPress?

Often it is the right answer, and when it is we will tell you. It stops being the right answer at the point where a theme and eleven plugins are the reason the page weighs two megabytes, and where the only person who could safely update it has left. What we hand over is a repository you own, content in a CMS your team can actually use, and no plugin with the power to break checkout on a Tuesday morning.

Somebody told us we need a new site for SEO. Is that this?

Partly, and it is worth being precise about which part. A fast, crawlable, correctly marked-up site removes the technical reasons you are not ranking, and that is real work with a real effect. It does not invent a reason for anyone to link to you. We will fix the first and tell you honestly whether the second is your actual problem, which it usually is.

Our last site cost a fraction of this. What are we paying for?

Mostly the parts that stay invisible until they fail. A template site is cheap because the performance, the accessibility and the security of eleven plugins are somebody else's assumption rather than anybody's responsibility. Here the weight budget and the accessibility check run in the build pipeline, the repository is yours from week one, and the price is fixed before anyone starts. If what you actually need is four pages and a contact form, say so and we will tell you to buy a template and spend the difference on photography.

What happens the first time we want to change something?

Copy and images are yours, in the CMS, the same afternoon. A genuinely new kind of page is a fixed-price addition, scoped the day you ask for it. Nothing is compiled into a theme only we understand, and the budget the build enforces keeps applying long after we have gone.

Tell us about the site you need.

A new site, a rebuild, or fixes to the one you have: say what the business does and what the site has to handle. To see where your current pages stand first, the free site check measures any page.

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