Web development, by hand

A page builder has to be able to make any layout, so it ships the machinery for all of them and then runs your page through it. That is why builder sites arrive heavy: the visitor downloads a general tool in order to see one specific page.

Writing the page directly skips that entirely. There is no engine to load, no theme to override, no plugin doing three things you need and forty you do not. What ships is the page. That is most of where the speed comes from, and speed is not vanity: visitors abandon sites that hesitate, and Google demotes slow ones.

Performance is usually audited at the end, when the only fixes left are cosmetic. We check it while building, on the connections our clients' customers actually use. The target is simple: the page becomes useful in about a second on mobile data.

That target is contractual. If your finished site does not hit Google's mobile speed marks at handover, we keep working on it at no extra charge until it does. You can test this claim on the page you are reading right now.

The exception is a build that cannot reach those marks because of what it has to do: an application running real work in the browser, a large media library, or a payment or booking provider whose code is not ours. We tell you that at the quote rather than at handover, and the number we can hold goes into the contract in place of the standard one.

This site loads zero third-party scripts and sets zero cookies, which is why it has no cookie banner. That is a demonstration, not a rule we would impose on you. Your site gets a script where the design or the functionality genuinely needs one: a booking calendar, a payment step, a map. Nowhere else.

The difference is that each one has to earn its place. The default is nothing, and something is added deliberately, which is the exact opposite of how most sites accumulate the fourteen trackers they end up carrying.

• The code is yours, in your own repository, at handover
• The domain is registered in your name, not ours
• Hosting is your account, so nobody can hold the site hostage
• No licence to renew and no builder subscription to stay on
• Any competent developer can pick it up, because nothing is proprietary
• Hosting and maintenance are offered monthly or yearly, and are entirely optional

We do not resell a theme with the colours changed, and we do not take on work where the honest answer is that a simpler tool would serve you better. If you need a five-product shop live by Friday at the lowest possible price, that work exists and is cheaper elsewhere. Say so and we will point you at it.