How the sites we build are different

It happened again: a local estate agent had their website taken offline, possibly lost for good, after what sounds like a miscommunication or disagreement with their web developer.

Many of these developers insist on also hosting the site. They charge a premium for underpowered servers, possibly with no backups and an infrequent patch schedule as they're unlikely to have dedicated operations staff.

If anything happens to the developer, or if there are disagreements, then eventually your site will go offline. If you're really unlucky, it's gone for good.

I think this is fundamentally wrong, so here's what we do differently when we build web sites.

1. Your website, your control

When we build you a site we deploy it to a hosting account owned by you, not us.

At project completion we deliver the full source code for the site to a location owned by you.

We build using well-known widely available technology like Nuxt.

Should anything happen to us, or if we part ways, the site you paid to have developed is yours and stays running without us. It is built in a way that it can continue to be developed.

2. No hosting fees

Unless you choose otherwise we setup Cloudflare to host your site. They don't charge for hosting the sites we develop so there's typically no hosting fees involved.

If your site requires special functionality like sending email or databases might there be charges involved by Cloudflare or a partner. We'd discuss that right up front before that feature is developed and talk through the options with you. It is also a direct relationship between the service provider and you, we do not sit in the middle making a mark-up.

3. Security

We develop sites using technology that builds your site once in a secure isolated environment as needed then serves that up to every visitor. This is known as static site generation and differs from technologies like WordPress (PHP), Wix and Umbraco (ASP.Net) which builds the page for each individual visitor on-demand.

Because of this our sites do not require routine security patching and are not vulnerable to the sorts of attacks stacks like WordPress see - which between themes and plugins has had over 1,400 vulnerabilities this month (October).

When we need to write special functionality we minimize the attack surface and it runs in a tightly contained environment with no way to take over the server.

4. Scale

Did your site make the front page of the Guernsey Press or sparked some interest in a large WhatsApp group or Facebook community?

This same static generation technology means that the page is immediately ready to be served up. No lengthy logic, calculations and database queries need to run for every visitor, it's all been done and ready to go.

The pages themselves are served up instantly from one of the worlds largest content networks - Cloudflare - which scales out instantly and on-demand at no cost to you.

5. Mobile-first

In 2026 over half of web traffic is now mobile and yet so many sites still fail to provide a great on-the-go-experience for visitors using their phones.

We use responsive layouts throughout development. They that flow naturally on a phone screen and ensure that mobile phone users are served up mobile-optimised images for a better experience.

6. Discovery

The old adage of "if you built it they will come" is not true on the web. Getting found requires your site can be discovered.

Semantic markup are the table stakes that some companies still get wrong. Canonical addresses, structured metadata, microformats, llms.txt, robots.txt, RSS feeds and XML sitemaps.

You don't need to know what any of these mean but we build them in to the sites we develop so search engine and AI bots know exactly what you do and can start sending people your way.

7. Maintenance

The one barrier for statically generated sites has been an editing experience that lags behind the ease of use of tools like WordPress and Wix.

The content itself exists in simple "markdown" files but that shouldn't mean you have to learn command lines, special codes or download editing tools.

Thankfully there are a number of "headless CMS" tools to maintain such sites but after trying several we thought we could do a much better job and our Intracia product is now in early access.

When we build your website we'll invite you in, with a complimentary three-month free trial. After that it's one low monthly fee per site for as many users as you want to add. Writers get a great Google-docs like experience with built-in video, image and audio management tools.

What are you waiting for?

You can have a website that's fast, readable by people and machines alike, has nothing to patch, and comes with no annual fees.

Our site is built exactly this way. If you'd like one too, talk to us about it.