A website is not a brochure
Plenty of founders arrive with the same picture in their head: a few pages, a logo, a contact form, done. That is a brochure. If a brochure is all you need, fine.
But a website is the shopfront and the sales rep that never close. It takes bookings, collects leads, shows proof and answers questions at two in the morning. Treat it like a leaflet and it will behave like one.
We believe a website should earn its keep. So start with what the site has to do for the business, and what you will count to know it is doing it. Colours can wait.
Every website is four things, and you only see one
The front end is what people see and tap: layout, type, buttons, animation. It runs in the visitor's browser. The back end is the part nobody sees. It saves a booking, checks a login, takes a payment, talks to your other tools. Plenty of sites need very little of it. Some are almost all of it.
Content is the words and images, the products and prices, and who changes them and how. Hosting is the computer that serves the whole thing to the world. Where it sits and how it is set up decide how fast pages load and what it costs to run.
The smallest build that does the job wins
A simple marketing site, a handful of pages that explain what you do, wants very little: plain HTML and CSS with a small amount of JavaScript. It loads fast and costs next to nothing to host. Anything heavier and you are paying for machinery you will never use.
A content site, such as a blog or a resource hub, needs a way for non-developers to publish. A content system earns its place here: WordPress is the best known, and a headless setup, where the editing screen is kept apart from the pages, is the more modern take.
A web app, where people log in and do things, needs a proper back end and careful engineering. An online shop usually wants a shop platform, unless your products or pricing are truly unusual. Building your own basket and payment handling is rarely brave and almost always expensive.
A site that must be found on search wants pages that arrive fully formed and load quickly. A site with 3D or motion, a product people can spin or a world they can walk through, wants WebGL tools such as three.js, used with discipline. The wow cannot cost the load time.
Pick the stack for the job, not for the logo
React is a library for building interfaces out of reusable pieces. Next.js sits on top of it and adds routing, server rendering and a sensible project structure. Brilliant for apps and big sites that mix content with interaction. Overkill for five pages and a phone number.
WordPress and similar content systems give you an editing screen and a huge pool of people who know them. The price is upkeep: security updates, and plugins that slow pages down if you let them pile up. Shopify and similar shop platforms help with baskets, payments, tax and stock. You rent the machinery and pay in flexibility.
Behind any of these there may be a back end written in Node, which is JavaScript on the server, or in Python, a favourite for data work and AI features. Cloud hosting puts your site on someone else's very large, very reliable computers, and can be set up to stretch when a post goes viral instead of falling over.
We believe in picking the stack after the job is clear, never before. None of it is better in general. Each is better for something.
Fast is a feature
Visitors do not think “this site is slow”. They think “I'll try someone else”. Google has said for years that page experience counts in how it ranks pages, and speed is mostly decided early: how much each page loads, how images are sized, which fonts it pulls in, whether a heavy framework is needed to show a paragraph.
So test on a mid-range phone on a patchy connection, not on the agency's laptop on office fibre.
Accessible and findable are not extras
An accessible site works for people who use screen readers, navigate by keyboard, zoom in or struggle with low contrast. It widens your audience, and in the UK the Equality Act asks businesses to make reasonable adjustments, which can include their website. Building it in is far cheaper than retrofitting it, because retrofitting touches the structure of every page.
Search works the same way. Can Google read the pages? Does each one have a clear title and one clear subject? Does the address structure make sense? Is the site quick? SEO bolted on after launch is a repair job. SEO planned from day one is simply how the pages are built.
We believe both belong in the first sketch, not the last week. Motion and 3D get a calmer version for people who ask their device to reduce motion, and text a search engine can still read.
What we ask before we quote
A fixed price after a ten-minute chat is a guess wearing a number. Before we put a figure on anything, we want to know: what must the site do for the business, and how will you know it is working? Who visits, on what device, in how much of a hurry?
Who will change the content, and how often? What must it connect to: payments, bookings, a CRM, stock? Do you have the brand, the words and the images, or are we making them too? What should it be found for, and where do you stand today? Where will it live, and who looks after it after launch?
If an agency quotes without asking any of this, it is quoting for a brochure. Make sure that is what you want.