The part of your technology customers actually see
Your website is the only piece of your infrastructure your customers ever interact with directly. It is also, in most businesses we take over, the piece nobody has looked at in three years. The plugin that powers the contact form stopped working in the spring and nobody noticed. The hosting is on a shared plan somebody set up on a personal credit card. The person who built it does not answer email anymore.
That is a solvable problem, and it is solvable by the same people who already keep the rest of your systems running.
Websites
For most businesses this is a marketing site, and the requirements are less exotic than agencies make them sound. It has to load fast, work on a phone, be findable in search, be editable by your team without calling anyone, and not fall over.
Performance and search. We build for Core Web Vitals rather than fixing them afterward. That means server rendered pages, images sized and compressed properly, no framework loaded to animate a button, and structured data emitted for the things search engines actually use. Technical SEO handled at build time is far cheaper than a plugin bolted on to compensate later.
Accessibility. Real labels on form fields, keyboard navigation that works, contrast that passes, semantic structure. This is both the right thing and an increasingly common source of demand letters against small businesses.
Editing. If your team needs to publish without involving us, we set up a content management system and train them. If they do not, we skip the complexity and the attack surface that comes with it.
Platform choice. WordPress where editing convenience matters and the site is genuinely a site. A static or server rendered build where performance and security matter more. We do not have a house platform we push regardless of fit.
Web applications and custom software
This is the work that starts with somebody describing a spreadsheet.
There is almost always a spreadsheet. It has fourteen tabs, one person understands it, it is emailed around as an attachment, and the business depends on it. It exists because the real system does not do the thing, so someone built a workaround that grew.
Custom development is what replaces that, and it is worth doing when three conditions hold: the off the shelf product almost fits, the gap costs real hours every week, and the workaround has become a risk. When those do not hold we will tell you to configure something existing instead, because that is nearly always faster and cheaper.
What this work looks like in practice:
- Client and vendor portals. Somewhere for people outside your business to see status, submit information or retrieve documents without emailing your staff.
- Internal tools. Scheduling, dispatch, inventory, quoting, approvals. The operational things every business does slightly differently.
- Integrations. Two systems that both hold customer data and neither of which knows about the other. Most of the tedium in a business day is a person acting as the integration.
- Reporting. Pulling numbers out of systems that hold them and putting them somewhere a decision can be made from.
Why buy this from your IT provider
When your site goes down, the questions are whether it is the application, the server, the network, DNS or the certificate. With separate vendors that becomes a conference call where everybody demonstrates it is not their problem.
We run the infrastructure and the code. Hosting, monitoring, backups, certificates, DNS, security patching and the application itself sit with one team. The same cybersecurity practices we apply to your internal systems apply to anything we build and host: patching on a schedule, dependencies monitored for known vulnerabilities, backups tested rather than assumed.
It also means the software we build fits the environment it runs in, because we already know what that environment is. See cloud solutions for how the hosting side is handled, and IT consulting if the question is what to build before it is how.
How a project runs
We scope before we quote. That means a conversation about what the thing has to do, who uses it and what happens today, followed by a written scope with a fixed price. Discovery on a larger project is sometimes a small paid engagement of its own, and we say so upfront rather than absorbing it into a vague estimate.
You see working software early and regularly rather than at the end. That is partly good practice and partly self interest, because the requirement somebody forgot to mention always surfaces the first time they use it.
And you own the result. Code, repository, domains, hosting and content are yours, handed over on request.