
Web & e-commerce development
Marketing sites, customer portals and storefronts — built for the Core Web Vitals Google measures you on, and hosted on infrastructure we run ourselves.
Web development is building the things your customers reach through a browser: the marketing site that has to rank and convert, the logged-in portal where they self-serve, and the storefront that takes money. Different jobs, different technology, one discipline.
We treat it as an engineering problem rather than a design deliverable. A beautiful site that takes four seconds to load on a mid-range Android phone on 4G is a failed project — most of your visitors left before they saw the design.
That matters more than it used to: Google's ranking signals now measure what real users on real devices experience, not what a synthetic test on a fast connection reports.
Getting this classification right in week one is what keeps a project on budget.
| Marketing site | Customer portal | E-commerce | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary goal | Rank, explain, convert to enquiry | Let existing customers self-serve | Sell, and keep the basket moving |
| Who logs in | Nobody | Authenticated customers | Customers, plus staff for fulfilment |
| Typical build | Next.js or WordPress, static-first | Next.js app with an API and database | Platform (Shopify/Woo) or custom checkout |
| Content changes | Marketing edits weekly | Rarely — it's an application | Catalogue and pricing, constantly |
| Integration load | Analytics, forms, CRM | Billing, auth, your core systems | Payments, tax, shipping, inventory, ERP |
| Where cost concentrates | Design and content | Business logic and permissions | Integrations and edge cases at checkout |
Most overruns we're asked to rescue started as a "simple website" that was really a portal, or a storefront quoted without counting the ERP integration.
From a five-page site that has to rank, to a storefront processing orders around the clock.
Marketing & corporate sites
Static-first builds that score green on Core Web Vitals, with a CMS your marketing team can actually use and structured data so search engines understand the pages.
Customer portals
Authenticated areas where customers check status, download documents, raise requests and update details — the five things that generate most of your inbound support calls.
E-commerce
Storefronts with multi-currency checkout, tax handling, shipping integrations and inventory that reflects reality rather than yesterday's export.
Headless & composable builds
A CMS or commerce engine at the back, a fast custom front end at the front. Right when content and commerce teams need to move independently of engineering.
Migrations & replatforming
Moving off a platform you've outgrown without losing rankings — URL mapping, redirects, structured data parity and a measured before/after.
Performance rescue
An audit and a fix programme for a site that already exists and is too slow. Often the cheapest revenue improvement available to a business.
Core Web Vitals are the pass/fail we hold ourselves to before a site goes live — measured on a mid-tier mobile device, not a desktop.
Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5s
How long until the main content is visible. The single strongest predictor of whether a visitor stays.
Interaction to Next Paint under 200ms
How quickly the page responds when someone taps. Poor INP is what makes a site feel broken even when it looks fine.
Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1
Whether content jumps while loading. High CLS is the cause of most accidental taps on the wrong element.
Total page weight budgeted per page
We set a byte budget in design, not after. It's how the other three stay green once marketing adds a video.
If a build we deliver doesn't hit these on launch, fixing it is our cost, not a change request.
Chosen by what the site has to do and who maintains it afterwards.
Custom builds
Where performance, integration depth or a specific experience matters most.
- Next.js
- React
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS
- Node.js
- PostgreSQL
CMS-led
Where a non-technical team publishes frequently and independently.
- WordPress
- Headless CMS
- Payload
- Sanity
Commerce
Where catalogue, checkout and fulfilment are the core of the build.
- Shopify
- WooCommerce
- Custom checkout
- Razorpay
- Stripe
Short, with a live URL early — reviewing a real page beats reviewing a mockup.
- 01
Audit & scope
We review what exists — performance, rankings, analytics, the actual user journeys — and agree what the new site must do better, in numbers.
- 02
Design
Wireframes, then visual design for key templates rather than every page. Performance budgets are set here, while they're still cheap to honour.
- 03
Build
A staging URL from the first week, updated continuously. Content loading, integrations and accessibility happen alongside the build, not after it.
- 04
Launch & measure
Redirect mapping, structured data, analytics verification and a post-launch check on real-user vitals — plus a rankings comparison at 30 days.
Web development covers what customers reach through a browser — marketing sites, portals and storefronts, usually built on established frameworks or platforms. Custom software development is bespoke business systems where the logic is the product. Portals sit on the boundary; if yours turns out to be an application wearing a website's clothes, we'll say so during scoping and quote it as software.

Start a project
Send the URL if it exists. We'll come back with an honest read on what's holding it back and what a rebuild would involve.
- Reply within one business day
- Free scoping session, no obligation
- You keep the scope document either way



