Service 05 — Website Build
A fast, plain site built to carry a growing library.
Websites built on modern, boring foundations: quick to load, easy to edit, structured so a hundred articles later it still makes sense. Design that serves the reading, not the portfolio.
Covered here
- Design systems
- Next.js & headless builds
- CMS setup
- Accessibility
- Performance budgets
- Migrations & launches
Most sites are built for launch day.
They look right with six pages and fall apart at sixty. There is nowhere sensible for a new article to live, the template only works with a perfect-length headline, and editing anything means asking a developer.
We build assuming the site will grow: templates that survive real content, a content model that anticipates the next subject, navigation that still works when the library doubles.
Speed is a design decision, not a plugin.
Performance is decided when someone chooses a video header, four typefaces and a chat widget — not afterwards. We set a budget at the start and design inside it.
The result is usually a static or server-rendered build with images processed properly, a small amount of JavaScript, and no third-party script that has not justified its weight.
You can edit it without us.
Every build hands over an editable CMS with the fields your team actually needs, plus a short written guide to publishing a new page correctly — including the parts that affect search.
We are happy to keep maintaining a site, but we do not build sites that hold you hostage. The code and the content are yours, in your accounts, from day one.
What you get
Deliverables, named plainly.
Design system
Type scale, colour, spacing and components — enough to keep future pages consistent without a designer on call.
Built site
Responsive, accessible, fast, with the templates a publishing site needs: pillar, article, service, index, legal.
CMS and handover
Editing set up for non-developers, with a written guide and a walkthrough recording.
Launch plan
Redirect map, analytics and Search Console checks, and a post-launch crawl so nothing quietly disappears.
How it runs
The order the work happens in
- 01
Structure
Sitemap, content model and templates, agreed before design. Copy leads; layout follows.
- 02
Design
Key templates designed with real copy at real lengths, on mobile first.
- 03
Build
Development against a performance and accessibility budget, reviewed on a staging URL you can click through.
- 04
Launch
Redirects, checks, monitoring, and a fortnight of watching the numbers afterwards.
Questions
About website build
Usually Next.js with a headless CMS, or WordPress where the team is already comfortable there. We pick for your editors, not for our preferences.
Works well with
What usually runs alongside this
Website Build
Think website build is where you should start?
Send the situation in a few sentences. If a different service would help more, we will say that instead — it costs us nothing to be straight with you.
- A written reply from the person who would do the work
- No pitch deck, no discovery call before a first opinion
- If we are the wrong fit, we will say so and point elsewhere