woking · surrey · remote
web design in woking
hand-coded websites for small businesses and studios — fast, accessible, and built to say something. no page builders, no themes, no templates.
i build websites the long way: written by hand, in code, tuned until they load fast and feel considered. that takes longer than dragging blocks around a page builder, and it produces a site that is genuinely yours — one that loads in under a second, works on a five-year-old phone, reads properly to a screen reader, and can be changed later without fighting a plugin.
- wokingbased in
- hand-codedno builders
- uk-wideremote too
what i build
sites made, not assembled
a small number of projects at a time, built properly rather than quickly. the work below is the usual shape of it.
business sites
the site a small business actually needs: who you are, what you do, how to reach you, and enough structure for google to understand all three. clear, quick, and easy to update.
portfolios for studios & makers
when the work is visual, the site has to get out of its way. layouts built around the images, typography that carries the tone, and motion only where it earns its place.
online shops
a proper storefront on stripe — real checkout, real receipts, no monthly platform fee eating the margin. suited to a focused catalogue rather than thousands of lines.
rescues & rebuilds
an existing site that has grown slow, fragile or unmaintainable, rebuilt on foundations you can keep. most often this means leaving a plugin-heavy wordpress install behind.
why hand-coded
the difference you can measure
it loads fast
page builders ship the whole toolbox to every visitor. hand-written code ships only what the page uses — which is most of the difference between a site that appears and a site that assembles itself while you wait.
search engines can read it
proper headings, real text, per-page titles and descriptions, a sitemap, structured data. none of it is exotic; it is just frequently missing.
it works for everyone
keyboard navigation, sensible colour contrast, alt text, and motion that respects a reduced-motion setting. accessibility is a legal expectation as well as a decent one.
you own it
the code is yours, hosted wherever you like, with no licence to renew and no vendor able to change the terms underneath you.
the work
what i build when nobody is briefing me
the best evidence of how someone builds is what they build unprompted. three daily puzzle games written from scratch — the drawing, the physics, the scoring — and two developer tools that put uk open data and a pixel-art studio into claude’s hands. all of it running on this site, all of it hand-written.
how it works
four steps, no surprises
- 01
a conversation
you tell me what the site is for and who it is for. i tell you honestly whether i am the right person to build it — sometimes the answer is that you need something simpler than i would make.
- 02
a fixed quote
scope and price in writing before anything starts, so the number at the end is the number you agreed at the beginning.
- 03
built in the open
you get a live preview link from the first week and can watch it take shape, rather than waiting for a reveal at the end.
- 04
launched and handed over
domain, hosting, analytics and search console set up and working, with the code handed over to you. i can stay on for changes, or you can take it from there.
where
woking, surrey, and wherever else
i am based in woking and happy to meet in person anywhere in surrey — guildford, weybridge, chertsey, walton, byfleet, and around. most of the work happens over email and a call regardless of where you are, so being elsewhere in the uk changes nothing except how often we shake hands.
start here
tell me about the project
a couple of sentences is plenty to begin with — what the site is for, roughly when you need it, and anything you already know you want. i reply to everything.