What we have learned.
Notes from 28 years of building websites.

A customer is on one of our client’s stores at 9pm, looking at a Miele oven, and they ask a specific question: does this model have the pyrolytic cleaning function, or is that the tier above? It’s a good question — the kind that decides whether they buy tonight or close the tab. And on a catalogue of nearly seven hundred products, the honest truth is that the precise answer might not be written into the store’s own data. So what happens next?

Here’s how most Magento store owners find out they’ve been hacked: not from an alert, but from a customer asking why their card was used somewhere they’ve never shopped — or from their payment processor flagging fraud traced back to the store. By then it’s often been weeks. The store has been working perfectly the whole time. That gap, between the moment of compromise and the moment anyone notices, is where nearly all the damage lives.

Most websites move information around. This one had to move money — reliably, in the right currency, against the right reference, for an academic journal whose submissions were on course to double.

For twenty-five years, “getting found online” meant one thing: ranking on Google. That’s changing. More and more people now ask a question of ChatGPT, or read Google’s AI-generated answer, and never c…

We’ve been building websites since 1998, and for most of that time a good share of the work has been for the public sector. Devon County Council, Cornwall Council, the Duchy of Cornwall, the Met Offic…

“Accessible” is one of the most over-used words in web design and one of the least often earned. On a public health site it isn’t a badge — it’s the difference between someone finding the help they ca…

Our new website scores 100 out of 100 on Google’s PageSpeed Insights. That’s a satisfying number to look at, but it’s not the point. The point is what the number stands for: a site that loads almost i…