Every site we build is made to your specification, and to how you imagined it. That is why no two of ours are alike. The only things we do not build are a handful of plugins that have earned their place.
Built to your specification, not chosen from a catalogue
Your site is built around your business: the layout, the words, the order the pages come in, and what you see when you log in to change something. If you can picture how it ought to work, that is where we start, rather than with a theme demo you have to bend the business around.
A template works the other way round. You pick the nearest fit and then spend the project making compromises: this section will not move, that colour is not one of the options, the thing you actually sell has nowhere sensible to go. Those compromises are invisible to whoever sold the template and obvious to you, every day, for years.
The plugins we do use, and why
A plugin is code somebody else wrote and somebody else has to keep updating. Every one you add is another thing to update, another way in, and often another monthly fee. We use six, because each does a job it would be daft to reinvent, and each has been looked after and watched over by a great many people for a long time.
- Advanced Custom Fields so the things you change are plain labelled boxes that match your business, with no page builder in the way.
- Contact Form 7 forms that have worked the same way for years, with no subscription and nothing passing through anybody else’s service.
- Yoast SEO the search settings you may want to keep an eye on yourself: titles, descriptions, and how a page looks when it is shared.
- LiteSpeed Cache speed, set up for the hosting your site actually sits on.
- WP Mail SMTP so the email your site sends arrives, and passes the checks that keep it out of junk folders.
- All-in-One WP Migration a full copy of your site that can be taken, kept and put back.
That is the list. If a seventh ever earns its place, there will be a reason and you will hear it.
Everything else, we build
Anything particular to your business gets written for your business:
- Custom Poker Chips a designer that draws your chip as you type, then carries the finished artwork into the order. Nothing off the shelf does that, which is rather the point: the product is one of a kind, so the shop had to be.
- K4 Kitchens their Checkatrade reviews and their video walk-throughs of finished kitchens, shown on whichever page needs them and edited from the dashboard.
- Invicta Couriers a booking request that asks for exactly what a transport office needs in order to quote.
- The free website check on this site ours, built the same way.
Each of those could have been assembled from general-purpose plugins with a settings screen each. It would have been slower, plainer, harder to change, and it would have cost a fee every month for as long as the site lived.
When off the shelf is the right answer
Sometimes it is. Taking card payments, running a shop with real stock and delivery rules, anything carrying a compliance burden: these are solved problems, and solved better by software a large team maintains than by us starting again. When that is the case we will say so and set it up properly, rather than selling you something bespoke you then have to live with.
What it means for you
- It looks and works the way you imagined it, because that is what it was built from.
- Fewer moving parts: fewer updates, fewer ways in, fewer subscriptions.
- It loads quickly, on a phone, on a normal connection.
- Nothing to renew: no licences, no per-seat fees, no feature locked behind an upgrade.
- The code we write for your site is written for you and stays with your site.