02 Services · 02 of 06
Website design & development.
Custom WordPress sites for charities, civic bodies, publishers and businesses with weight. Editorial-led, performance-first, built to be owned by your team — not us.
Scope
What we make, and who for.
Five kinds of site cover what we mostly get briefed to build. Each is a starting point, not a category — the architecture of the actual site comes out of the brief.
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Marketing sites
For businesses, professional services, and agencies where the site is the storefront. Editorial confidence on the brand pages, conversion mechanics where it counts, fast enough that a paid-traffic landing page doesn’t leak before it loads.
Recent: Harlow Group · Goldcrest Investments
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Editorial & publication sites
For think tanks, magazines, and civic publishers whose audience reads, downloads, and cites. Built around the report or article library, with schema markup that makes the content findable on the day it’s published.
Recent: Centre for Social Justice
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Charity & civic sites
For charities, public bodies, and advocacy organisations — where accessibility isn’t a checkbox and the audience includes journalists, parliamentarians, and the people the work serves. We build accessibility in from week one, audit it before launch, and publish the statement.
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Member & community sites
Gated areas for memberships, schools, communities, and professional bodies. We build the authentication and the gated content model on the same WordPress foundations, so your editors don’t have to learn a second system.
Recent: The Parenting Circle
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Campaign microsites
Single-purpose sites for campaigns, public consultations, launches, and events. Built fast without cutting corners on performance or accessibility — the audience and the press still expect it to load.
Patterns
Built from a toolkit, not a template.
Six patterns that show up across most of our work — each designed once, refined over years, reused on sites where they earn their keep. The same ones live on the case-study pages of this site.
Eyebrow · Tag
A real type system, baked in.
The studio scale lives in CSS variables, used on every project.
Body type at 16px, line height 1.65, Gibson 500 with tabular numerals. Headlines fluid at clamp(2rem, 4vw, 3.4rem). Hierarchy considered once, then held.
01 · Editorial typography
A real type system, not a Figma library.
Eyebrow, headline, deck, standfirst, body — defined once, used everywhere.
02 · Reading thread
Progress, in the margin.
A chartreuse thread that fills as the reader scrolls. Quiet, useful, never in the way.
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03 · Annotated mockups
Design intent, surfaced.
Numbered hotspots over a screenshot, with hover-revealed call-outs explaining the design moves.
04 · Before / after
This, then that.
Draggable comparison so the redesign reads as transformation, not just before-and-after photos in a row.
05 · Lighthouse gauges
Proof, no asterisks.
Real launch-day Lighthouse scores shown on every case study, alongside the measured-outcome numbers.
// JSON-LD on every page { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Article", "headline": "…", "author": { … }, "datePublished": "2025-03" }
06 · Schema.org markup
Findable on launch day.
Structured data on every public-facing page, so reports show up in rich-result surfaces when journalists Google them.
Approach
Structure first, then everything else.
We work the information architecture before the design, and the design before the build. Six passes in order, each with a sign-off so the cost of changing your mind goes up over time, not down.
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Discovery
Interviews with the client team and a representative slice of the audience. Audit of the existing site — analytics, content inventory, anything that’s already working. The brief gets sharper before anything else starts.
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Information architecture
Sitemap, taxonomy, content model. Decided in plain English before anyone opens a design tool. Signed off as a written document, not a wireframe.
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Design
Editorial-led. Type and hierarchy first, components second, imagery last. A real design system — not a Figma library that has to be re-translated for build.
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Build
Custom WordPress block theme, written by hand. No page builders, no bloated plugins. The editor uses Gutenberg with an opinionated set of blocks we’ve designed for the brief.
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Performance & accessibility
Performance budget set in the first week and held throughout. Accessibility built in — never bolted on. External audit against WCAG 2.2 AA before launch for sites where it matters.
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Launch & training
DNS, hosting, redirects from the old site, search console handover. Editorial training and a written guide so the team that owns the site after we leave actually owns it.
Deliverables
What you actually get.
The concrete list of outputs at the end of a typical project. Not everything applies to every brief — the discovery pass tells us which.
Design
- Sitemap & content model
- Visual system & component library
- Editorial typography & hierarchy
- Responsive design across breakpoints
- Accessibility designed in, not bolted on
- Editorial style notes for the team
Development
- Custom WordPress block theme
- Content modelling with ACF
- Schema.org markup site-wide
- SEO foundations — canonicals, OG, sitemaps
- Performance budget held throughout
- Cookie / consent setup (cookie-free by default)
Launch & care
- DNS & hosting setup
- Redirect map from the previous site
- Editorial training session & written guide
- Accessibility statement & external audit
- 30-day post-launch warranty
- Optional on-demand support at day rate
Selected work
Sites we’ve made, across sectors.
Wedge
What we don’t do.
Things we get asked for that we’d send you elsewhere for. Telling you up front saves everyone time — and the wrong studio is more expensive than the right one.
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Page builders
No Elementor, Divi, WPBakery. They make sites slower, harder to maintain, and visually inconsistent over time.
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Open-ended retainers
They encourage make-work. We charge by project, then by day when you need us after launch. No mystery monthly invoice.
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Stock photo padding
If you don’t have art for a section, we’ll write to fit the gap, not paste a stock photo of a smiling stranger over it.
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Mystery pricing
No "from $X" copy. Send us a written brief and we’ll send back honest numbers with the cost drivers spelled out.
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Specialist pigeonholing
We don’t pretend to be a charity specialist or a B2B agency. Every brief is its own brief — that’s the whole point.
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Carousels & auto-play hero videos
Nobody clicks past slide one. We give the lead content its own space and trust the reader to scroll.
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“Phase 2” cost creep
We don’t pad a phase 1 quote to win the brief and then bolt features on later. The brief is the brief; if scope grows, we re-quote openly.
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Ghosting after launch
The 30-day post-launch warranty means real fixes, picked up by a human, not chat-bot deflection.
FAQ
Common questions, answered straight.
The seven we’re asked on most first calls. If yours isn’t here, send it through — we’ll answer it on the first reply, not the third.
Do you use a page builder?
No. We build custom block themes for WordPress — page builders make sites slower, harder to maintain, and visually inconsistent over time. The editor still lets your team add content easily, just without the bloat.
If you’ve already got an Elementor or Divi site and want to keep working with us, the right move is usually a clean rebuild rather than a patch.
How does ownership work?
You own everything. The theme code lives in your repo, the content lives in your database, the domain and hosting are in your name. If you ever stop working with us, your site keeps working.
What about hosting?
We’re hosting-agnostic. We can recommend managed WordPress hosts we trust (currently Kinsta, Pressidium, or WP Engine depending on budget and shape of the site), or work with your existing setup.
For sites that need to hold up during traffic spikes — policy launches, press cycles, campaigns — we’ll also set up Cloudflare in front.
Will the site be accessible?
Yes. We build to WCAG 2.2 AA as the baseline. For sites where it matters most — charity, civic, education — we arrange an independent audit before launch and publish the statement alongside the site.
Accessibility is designed in from the first sketches, not bolted on at the end. It’s cheaper that way, and the resulting site is better for everyone.
Do you do ongoing support?
Sort of. We don’t sell open-ended retainers; they tend to encourage make-work. Instead we run a 30-day post-launch warranty for anything genuinely broken, then on-demand support at our day rate when you need us.
If your site needs structured monthly attention — an ecommerce site, a high-traffic publication — we’ll quote that as part of the build, not as an upsell after it.
Can our team update the site ourselves?
That’s the design assumption. The custom block theme gives editors a guided, opinionated set of building blocks — easier to use than default WordPress, harder to break than a free-text editor.
Every project includes an editorial training session and a written guide your team can refer back to.
How does pricing work?
Project-by-project. We scope each one from a written brief — content depth, integrations, design ambition, accessibility audit needs. We’re transparent about cost drivers and we don’t pad.
Send us a brief and we’ll send back honest numbers, usually within a week.