Websites and Web Applications

So we start by asking what a successful visit looks like. For a B2B services company it is usually a contact form filled in by someone who already understands what you do. For a store it is a completed checkout. For an information portal it is a second page view. Those are three different websites, even when they share a design language.

Once that is settled, the visual work gets much easier to judge. You stop arguing about whether a hero image is nice and start asking whether the first screen tells a stranger what you sell.

The same technical foundations sit under all of these, which is why growing from one into another later is usually an extension rather than a rebuild.

A platform gives you a large ecosystem, cheap editing and a well-trodden path, right up until the thing you need sits outside it. From that point on you fight the platform for the rest of the project. Custom code gives you exact control over performance, structure and integrations, and costs more up front.

A reasonable rule of thumb: the more your site is ordinary content and the less it needs to talk to your other systems, the better a platform serves you. The more the site is the product, the more custom code pays for itself. We will tell you which side of that line we think you are on, including when the answer is the cheaper one.

We treat performance as a constraint during the build rather than a pass at the end, because the fixes that matter are architectural. How images are handled, how much JavaScript ships to the browser, whether pages render on the server: those are early decisions, and unwinding them later is painful. Responsive behaviour works the same way. Accessibility too. Readable contrast, keyboard navigation and a correct heading structure are cheap when they are built in and tedious when they are retrofitted.

We plan around that: agreeing early what each page needs, building against placeholder structure so work continues, and helping with the writing where that is useful. It is worth being honest that this is where projects slip, because the earlier you start on it, the less it costs you.

After launch, the first few weeks are the most informative you will get. Analytics show where people leave, which pages get read to the end, and which navigation labels nobody ever clicks. We set that measurement up before go-live so the data exists when you want to ask, and so the first round of changes is based on behaviour rather than opinion.