Website Build

Built by hand, with no page builder

Every site is designed and then written by hand. No page builder, no marketplace theme, no stack of plugins doing work that thirty lines of code would do better.

The reason is not craft for its own sake. A page builder ships its own layout engine, its own CSS, and its own JavaScript to every visitor whether the page uses them or not, and it locks your content into markup only that builder understands. Hand built means the page sends what the page needs, and means a problem can be found and fixed rather than worked around.

This site is the example. It runs a bespoke theme with no parent, no builder, and a gated photo album system that serves full resolution files through a server side code check. If you want to know what the standard is, you are reading it.

What a build includes

• Bespoke design, no templates, drawn for your content rather than adapted to fit someone else’s
• Up to eight page templates, which covers most sites without padding the quote
• A photography gallery system where the site needs one
• A performance and SEO pass before launch, not as an upsell afterwards
• Two weeks of post launch support

You will be able to update it yourself

Built on WordPress, and built so the things you will actually want to change are editable without touching code or calling us. Copy, contact details, images, prices, the items in a list. Those live in normal editable fields.

The test we hold ourselves to is whether you can change a phone number on a Friday afternoon without help. A site that needs a developer for that is a subscription with extra steps.

Performance is a design decision

Speed is decided while the page is being designed, not recovered afterwards with a caching plugin. Image sizes, what loads before the first screen appears, which fonts are fetched, whether a script is needed at all: those are design choices, and the plugin you install at the end is compensating for them.

Worth saying plainly, because plenty of quotes imply otherwise: nobody can promise you a particular position in Google. What a build can do is make sure nothing on the site is standing in the way. Correct page titles and descriptions, a heading structure that makes sense, structured data that describes the business accurately, images that carry real alternative text, a sitemap search engines can read, and pages that load fast on a phone on mobile data.

What happens after launch

Two weeks of support is included, which covers the things that only surface once real people are using the site. After that there is no mandatory retainer. A hand built site with few plugins is a low maintenance object by design, and the honest position is that most small business sites need attention a few times a year, not every month.

What does need doing is WordPress and plugin updates, and someone paying attention when one of them changes behaviour. You can do that yourself, and we will show you how, or hand it over. Either way you own the hosting account and the domain, in your name, with your card on it. A studio that holds those on your behalf is holding your business hostage politely, and we will not do it even if you ask.

Redesigns and rescues

Not every project starts blank. Common ones: a site nobody can edit any more, a theme whose developer has vanished, a build that got slow as things were bolted on, or a site that looks fine on a desktop and falls apart on a phone.

In those cases the first thing is an honest look at what is there, and sometimes the honest answer is that the existing site is closer to fine than you think and needs three fixes rather than a rebuild. We will say so if that is the case.

Scoped per project and quoted against what you need. Based in Melbourne, working with businesses across Victoria and remotely. Tell us what the site has to do and what is wrong with the current one, and we will tell you what it takes.