Nine years of workshop taught us that before anything else. Half your visitors close a page that takes more than three seconds, and they do not come back to check whether it was pretty.
People believe a slow site is optimised at the end. It is not: the expensive decisions are taken at the start, when a three-hundred-kilobyte animation library is chosen for an effect that needed ten, or when four remote fonts are loaded for three heading levels. No later optimisation makes up for those choices, they can only be undone. So we settle them at the mock-up stage.
The second principle is that a site must work without depending on anyone. Every third-party resource is a point of failure, a data leak and an admission: a font loaded from an American server transmits each of your visitors' addresses before any consent, which makes your own privacy page untrue. We bring everything in house, fonts included, which costs a little space and settles the matter for good.
The third is that accessibility is not a moral option but a manufacturing constraint. Sufficient contrast, keyboard navigation, coherent reading order, alternative text that describes rather than names. It benefits the people concerned first, and incidentally everyone else: the same rules make a site usable in sunlight, on an old phone, or one-handed on the underground.
How many pages, which ones and what each must achieve, before any colour.
Before a single colour, we decide how many pages, which ones, and what each must obtain from the visitor. A site of twelve useful pages beats one of forty where thirty exist only to fill a menu. This stage produces a plan you approve, and it is the only moment when changing your mind costs nothing.
One direction, defended and adjusted with you, not three routes to choose between.
One mock-up, not three: presenting three routes means asking the client to do the choosing for us. We defend one direction, argued, and adjust it with you. Variants exist, but they concern controlled details, not three worlds two of which we do not believe in.
Hand-written code, light, that keeps the page from jumping.
Code written by hand, without a visual builder, because a drag-and-drop site produces two-megabyte pages that no optimisation redeems. Images dimensioned in the markup so the page does not jump while loading, self-hosted fonts split by character range, scripts loaded only if they are needed.
Animations that guide the eye and step aside for those who ask for less motion.
They exist to guide the eye, never to occupy the screen. Each is triggered on entering the viewport rather than on load, and all of them stand down if the visitor has asked for reduced motion in their system: ignoring that setting makes a site painful for people prone to motion sickness.
A short checkout, with delivery costs shown from the basket.
When there is selling, everything is judged at the funnel: number of steps, fields requested, payment methods, costs announced early. The leading cause of abandonment remains a delivery charge discovered on the last page. We show it from the basket onward, which lowers the add-to-cart rate and raises revenue.
Updates, backups and monitoring, so a site does not slip back.
Updates, monitoring, daily backups kept thirty days, certificate renewed, restoration within four hours. A site delivered then abandoned loses its value in eighteen months: browsers change, engines change, and a page that does not evolve falls back without doing anything wrong.
A showcase site takes six to ten weeks, a shop twelve to sixteen. Here is what happens during that time, and what we need from you at each stage.
Interviews, review of what exists, analysis of three competitors, sitemap. Above all we ask you to tell us what the site must OBTAIN: a call, a quote, a sale, an application. A site with no named objective is judged on taste, and taste is never shared.
Two pages drawn in full, the home page and the most strategic one, in wide and phone versions. We do not draw all twelve: once those two are approved, the rest follows and is drawn while building.
Build, content, motion, forms, measurement. You watch the site advance on a private address, page after page, rather than discovering a result at the end. Corrections cost less the earlier they come.
Speed measured on a real phone and not only in a lab, keyboard navigation, contrast, screen reader, forms actually submitted, redirects from old addresses. It is the stage skipped when time is short, and the one most expensive to recover.
Switch-over, redirects verified one by one, sitemap submitted, close monitoring for two weeks. A rebuild always moves positions: we watch closely to tell a normal movement from a genuine problem.
Put online on hosting and a domain name that we configure for you: certificate, backups, monitoring and security headers. Both are paid for separately; setting them up is included. The site is maintained for as long as you are with us; your copy, your images and your domain names stay yours from the first day to the last.
The architecture decided at framing, with each page's objective. It is the document that stops a site growing at the mercy of requests and ending up with four pages saying the same thing.
Speed measured on mobile and desktop, accessibility, contrast, keyboard navigation, redirects verified. With the figures, not a ticked box: you can rerun them yourself and get the same.
How to change a text, add a page, replace an image. Written for someone who is not in the trade, with screenshots. It serves the day you want to make a correction without waiting for us.
When it is justified, yes: for a site you feed often, an editing tool everyone knows beats an elegance nobody can operate. For a showcase site that changes three times a year, a hand-written page is faster, safer and free of weekly updates to watch. We choose according to your real use, not our habits.
Yes, and it is planned from the design stage. Depending on the plan you get an editing area for texts and images, with the documentation that goes with it. Anything touching structure or code stays on our side, because that is where a well-meant change breaks search without warning.
We record every one of its addresses before the switch and redirect them one by one to their equivalent. It is tedious and it is what stops ten years of positions vanishing overnight. A rebuild with no redirect plan is the most efficient way to remove a site from Google.
Yes, and not merely through a banner. Compliance begins with not setting a tracker before consent, which most sites nonetheless do from the first image loaded from a third-party server. We bring those resources in house, which makes the banner honest instead of decorative.
Leave us your website and a word about your project. A director studies it and replies to you personally within twenty-four hours: what holds your visitors back, what we would do, and whether your house can join us. It is the first door of admission, and it commits you to nothing.