Service
Website Engineering
The platform is a consequence of the requirements, not a starting position. A brochure site, a catalogue of forty thousand products and an editorial publication are three different problems, and only one of them is a CMS question.
Request thisProject or day rate
- Fixed scope, or day rate
- Two weeks to three months
- Documented code, your hosting, your repository
- A build, a rebuild, or a platform move
Deliverables
What You Actually Receive
Named up front, so there is something to hold the work against when it is finished.
Platform Decision, Written Down
Which platform, why, and what it costs you later. Recorded before the build, so the reasoning survives after the person who made it moves on.
The Build
Templates, content modelling, editorial workflow, and the integrations the business already depends on. Performance budgets are set at the start, not audited at the end.
Compliance In The Build
Consent, analytics and accessibility handled during the build, where they cost hours, rather than after launch, where they cost a retrofit.
Documented Handover
A README that describes the deployment, the environments and the decisions, good enough to hand to a stranger.
In detail
How The Work Runs
Choosing The Platform
WordPress earns its place when editors need to work without a developer, when the content model is broadly conventional, and when a large plugin ecosystem is an asset rather than a liability. WooCommerce earns its place on the same terms, with the added condition that the catalogue and checkout stay inside what it does well.
Past a certain point they stop paying. Deeply custom data models, heavy integration surfaces, or applications that happen to have a public front end are cheaper and steadier built directly.
| Signal | Points to WordPress | Points to a custom build |
|---|---|---|
| Editing | Non-developers publish weekly | Content changes rarely, or by import |
| Content model | Pages, posts, a handful of types | Deeply relational, or externally owned |
| Commerce | Catalogue and checkout fit WooCommerce | Bespoke pricing, quoting or fulfilment |
| Integrations | A few, with maintained plugins | Many, or with systems nobody has heard of |
| Traffic shape | Steady, cacheable | Spiky, personalised, or logged-in |
| Team after launch | Agency or freelancer maintains it | In-house developers own it |
Nothing here is decisive on its own. Most projects sit on both sides of the table, and the job is weighing which column the expensive parts fall in.
That decision gets made once, in the open, with the trade-offs written down.
Performance Is A Budget, Not A Phase
A page weight and request budget is agreed before the first template is written, and every addition is measured against it. This is the only reliable way to ship a fast site: retrofitting performance means removing things people have already been promised.
A budget that is only checked at the end is not a budget. It is an apology written in advance.
A typical starting budget, adjusted to what the site actually has to do:
| Metric | Budget | Hard stop |
|---|---|---|
| HTML, gzipped | 20 KB | 40 KB |
| CSS, gzipped | 15 KB | 30 KB |
| JavaScript, gzipped | 0 KB | 60 KB |
| Requests, first view | 12 | 25 |
| LCP, 4G mobile | 1.5 s | 2.5 s |
The same applies to the third-party tags marketing will ask for after launch. There is a defined amount of room for them, and it is finite.
What Happens At The End
The code is yours, in your repository, on your hosting, with the deployment documented. No agency licence, no proprietary page builder that only I can operate, and no arrangement where leaving means rebuilding.
Other services
The Rest Of It
Most engagements start with one of these and turn into another. That is fine. The scope gets re-agreed, not absorbed.
Site Audit
Performance, security, GDPR and accessibility, checked against the live site. Written report in five working days, with the fixes ranked by what they are worth.
Accessibility & EAA Compliance
The European Accessibility Act has applied to new online services since June 2025, and 2026 is the first full year national authorities supervise against it. An audit against EN 301 549, then the fixes, in priority order.
Custom Software
Internal tools, dashboards, portals and integrations. Software shaped around how the business already works, rather than the other way round.
Rescue & Recovery
Hacked site, failed update, broken migration, or a developer who stopped answering. I take it, stabilise it, and tell you plainly what happened.
Care Plans
Updates, monitoring, backups, security and small fixes. The same person every month, reachable directly.