Reintroducing Intracia

I've been looking forward to the re-launch of our website for some time and now not only is it finally ready, we're also ready to show you what we've been working on behind the scenes for our clients who just want to update their own sites.

The site

I launched my first company web site with pastel shades and drop-shadows all the way back in 1997 to show off my shareware products. Over the decades since I've had many roles at many companies but I always find myself working on a web site for someone - and when it's quiet for myself. My blog has long served not just as a place to write but as a platform for experimenting with new technology.

I'd like to say web development got easier over time but for each advancement in tooling new requirements and challenges outpaced them. Technical requirements, business requirements, accessibility and scale all while raising the bar in terms of content and visual design.

Developing and maintaining a good web site became a significant effort.

So about 8 years ago I made the switch to static site generation. It eliminates the entire surface area for security while giving you performance and scalability at a cost that's close to free.

But there's a catch - there always is - and that was that editing and adding content got put behind a gate. Not necessarily a technical one but certainly a skill-issue one. More on that below.

What we take on

Intracia has been operating in one form or another since 2014, and became a full-time consultancy in 2020 when we relocated to Guernsey, growing mostly through word of mouth and existing relationships.

We take on four kinds of work, though not exclusively, based on what we're experienced in. They are:

Software development — applications and APIs, designed by someone who has done this at scale.
Web applications & sites — customer-facing apps and company sites, built end to end.
Data extraction & recovery — getting valuable data out of difficult and undocumented systems.
Developer & AI tooling — libraries, SDKs and internal tooling, plus the AI MCP servers and evaluation harnesses that decide whether an AI feature survives contact with production.

It's a short, focused list, which means you're paying for experience, not for somebody to learn on the job or that might cause risk to your project. We've done these things, we do them well.

The Intracia app

Here's where it gets interesting. I first imagined Intracia as a tool to make running a site more manageable. It was born of frustration at how much harder modern sites had become while I was working on xbox.com: privacy policies, accessibility, localization, mobile, browser compatibility, speed, search ranking and more. All worthwhile, but all adding to the overhead of creating a great site — and to the time and cost of delivering one.

We'd solved many of those issues with our chosen stack, but some pieces were still missing, and that's where our new software-as-a-service (SaaS) product comes in.

At launch it's focused on the biggest pain point I still have today: editing the content of a static site.

I'd tried many "headless CMS" products — Forestry, Tina, CloudCannon — and evaluated a few others, but none had the approachability of WordPress. While we solved the performance and security switching to a static site what we really want is something as approachable as WordPress - ideally with better guardrails to keep the content looking professional. We really don't need people to mess with font colors, layouts and style in the middle of their post.

Intracia solves these problems with a clean, style-based approach to editing that also understands the structured metadata of each piece of content — the job title on a job posting, the category and author of a blog post, the client name on a case study — and wraps it in a content-first experience. Smart setup, with optional AI assistance, takes the complexity out of the day-to-day.

And it does all that without touching your existing static site pipeline. Your content stays in Git, your site stays with the host of your choice, your media stays in your own S3, R2 or Azure bucket. Intracia provides a smooth, mobile-friendly interface over the top to ensure that your stack is approachable to your team and everyone you want to use their voice.

It works with Nuxt Content, Astro, Jekyll, Next.js and whatever Markdown, YAML, JSON or TOML content you already use. It integrates with GitHub today, with GitLab and Bitbucket planned, and tools for SEO and site consistency are on the way.

Intracia is currently in early access, and adopting it doesn't interfere with your existing build. It's easy come, easy go, and we're onboarding sites one at a time to refine the setup until it's practically hands-off.

If it sounds useful, join the waitlist. Tell us what you're running and we'll tell you what to expect.

What comes next

The journey to developing Intracia and the various tools, tips and techniques we've developed along the way are worthy of additional posts and articles themselves and I hope to add more over the coming weeks and months so stay tuned!

(Note that these posts are human-written as are most of the pages on the site with AI helping on privacy and legal terms and the product comparison grid. We're big fans of AI for computer-to-computer communications like coding but think if you want a human to spend time reading what you have to say then you have to put the human effort into saying it.)

Thanks for reading

Damien