We started this because we kept being handed the wreckage.

Every one of us has been called in to fix a website somebody else built, and the story is almost always the same.

A local business — a contractor, a clinic, a law practice, a restaurant — pays four figures for a site. It looks fine on the laptop it was demonstrated on. It goes live. And then, nothing. No calls, no enquiries, no visibility. Six months later they assume the internet does not work for businesses like theirs, and they go back to word of mouth.

When you actually open the thing up, the causes are almost never subtle. The whole site renders client-side, so a crawler saw an empty page. Every URL canonicalises to the homepage. A staging robots.txt went to production and blocked everything. There is no Google Business Profile at all, which means the map pack — the block that fills a phone screen before a single organic result appears — was never even contested. The contact form collects a phone number with no consent checkbox, so every follow-up text the owner sends is a potential statutory damages claim they have never heard of.

None of that was visible to the person who paid. The site looked finished. It was finished, in the same way a car with no engine is finished.

Why this keeps happening

Two reasons, and neither is that web designers are lazy. The first is that visual design and search visibility are genuinely different disciplines, and someone excellent at the first has no particular reason to be good at the second. The second is that page builders and, more recently, AI code generation have made it possible to produce something that looks like a finished website without understanding what any of it does. When it renders, it looks done. Nobody involved has a reason to check whether Google can read it.

We are software engineers. That is not offered as a credential so much as a working method: read the documentation, measure the result, and do not ship something you cannot explain. Applied to websites, that method produces a site that is fast because we know what makes it slow, and visible because we know what makes it invisible.

How we work

We are small and intend to stay small. There is no sales team, no account manager relaying your questions to a developer you never meet, and no subcontracting. The person who scopes your project is one of the people who builds it, and you have their contact details.

We do not work a geographic patch. We work a trade. Local search rewards knowing a market properly — and for a contractor, that market is defined by what he sells and who he bids against, not by which county he is in. An HVAC company in Tampa has far more in common with one in Boise than either has with the law firm on its own street.

We are not in the United States, and we would rather say so than rent a mailbox to imply otherwise. None of the work requires us to be: profile optimisation, categories, reviews, citations, content and the technical build are all done remotely, and we have written up none of it geography-locked. The one thing we cannot do from here is stand in your unit and photograph your vans — so we tell you what to shoot and you send it over.

The trade-off is capacity. We take a limited number of builds at a time, and if we are full we will tell you when we are not rather than accepting work we cannot do properly.