Over the many years of designing and building portfolio websites for our clients, we have found that a focussed period of time, from both us and you, can be the key in creating a well designed, well curated, cost efficient website.

Designing and developing a new website is a team effort in which we work closely with the artist to develop a visual language that feels right, a structure which navigates their practice correctly and ultimately a website that represents the work in the best possible way. To achieve this we have developed a streamlined process which allows us to deliver portfolio sites efficiently whilst working effectively with the artist to curate the content of the project.

All of our websites are custom, we do not use off the shelf templates and our websites are built entirely with the client in mind. This means we design and develop websites that are entirely unique and can represent that artist's work outside of the constraints of a prebuilt template.

We will send over a formal quote and a pack detailing what we need from you to start the process. This will outline some things that you will need to think about before we start our week together, such as; any websites that you find inspiring, how you would like your work to be represented and advice on gathering your current content. We will also ask you to pay a deposit to book your week in with us, that will usually be around 40% of the quoted fee.

We will start with a Zoom meeting first thing to go through your references, work and content. We will talk through some initial ideas together and any specific requirements you have for the backend of the website. We will then set out any tasks we need you to work on whilst we start our design process. Once we are finished on the call we will get to work on our initial designs (we use Figma to provide you with semi-interactive design options).

We will once again start the day with a Zoom call, this time to present some first design ideas and talk about how we think we should best structure and show your work. We will discuss things such as typography, layout, colour and image treatment. Taking your feedback into account we will go away and make any adjustments to these design layouts before reconvening on another call at the end of the day to present you with the adjusted designs. At this point we hope to have designs that you feel are ready to proceed to the development stage. During these calls we may also briefly discuss any queries you have around your content and set out any tasks that you can achieve such as images or text that need work.

Today we start the full development process. We will start the day by setting up the bones of the site, this includes getting servers setup, setting up the backend (we use the fantastic Craft CMS) and getting our coding environment setup. Sometime around lunchtime we should have a backend ready for you to log in to. Once this is ready we will get in touch to have a Zoom call to show you how this works so you can start adding content. During this phase you will not see anything (or very little) on the frontend of the site but it is a great time to get your content together and organised. 

This is an opportunity to discover any small elements you are missing, whilst uploading your content you may find minor functions that you didn't realise you needed during the design phase, this is why we will have another quick call at the end of this day to discuss anything you think is missing from the backend structure.

We will be in full development swing! You may start to notice things changing on the frontend while you are continuing to upload your content. We advise to be a little patient here whilst we code out the frontend of your website, things will look unfinished! We will however be on hand for any questions/comments about the backend throughout the day.

We will arrange a Zoom call for the morning where we will show you the progress of the frontend and discuss any tweaks that are needed to get the site ready for launch.

Once the site is ready to go we will get the domains (please make sure you have the login details!) and servers ready for launch. We will request a final go ahead from you and then get the site live.

Once live we will have a quick call to show you any other elements that you will need, such as how to view your site analytics and answer any final questions you have.

Your site will now be live!

This will include a basic hosting plan managed by our hosting partner.

We include 2GB of image data transfer per month on our CDN platform and 20GB of storage.

Plausible analytics is included with 4,000 page views per month.

Automatic backups are NOT included in this package. Manual database backups are easily accessible in the backend, we can show you how to do this. We recommend you download and store backups at regular intervals or when you have made major edits to the site.

This will include a hosting plan with more server resources than our basic plan for a faster performing site. This is managed by our hosting partner.

We include 5GB of image data transfer per month on our CDN platform and 30GB of storage.

Plausible analytics is included with 10,000 page views per month.

Automatic database backups are included and managed by our hosting partner with backups stored for the last 14 days.

This includes everything in our standard plan with the added peace of mind that we will check in on your site once a month to perform any minor CMS updates (major CMS upgrades will be priced on quotation) and any small niggles you have (limited to a maximum of 1 hour per month). This will ensure that your site has the most up to date security updates, keeping your site secure and performing well.

We can also highlight and review any bugs that have crept in and cost up these fixes should you decide that necessary.

We are happy to offer more advanced plans. These can include a monthly hourly allowance of our time if you require more regular development changes to your site, or should you just wish to have some help uploading content.

Let us know when you get in touch and we can provide a cost for this service.

All plans are to be paid by direct debit on a monthly basis. We will set this up once your site is live. We will need one full month's notice to cancel and once cancelled, your site will no longer be available and servers will be deleted along with any content and analytics. Should you wish to migrate the site elsewhere we will charge a fee to get everything ready (cost provided on request at time of cancellation) and provide you with the necessary files. You will most likely need a developer or development experience to make use of these files.

Over the years we have tried many CMS's (Content Management Systems) and have built on many different platforms for many different clients. We have found that Craft CMS is by far the easiest, most stable and most performant whilst enabling us to develop websites quickly and efficiently. Ultimately we believe Craft is the best CMS for the job which is why we hope that once you dive in you will quickly agree!

We have built websites on Craft for all sizes of organisations, businesses and individuals and it is incredibly scalable. For our portfolio sites we build on the free version of Craft which is only limited by its ability for a single user, however we have generally found that it is more than sufficient for a portfolio website. 

Should you wish to increase the number of users that you would like to allocate to the site we can discuss those options with you, it involves a one-off licence fee + a yearly fee for updates.

In general, we do not use Google Analytics. Google Analytics is free monetarily, however the hidden cost is their sale and use of user data (ever feel like you are being followed around on the internet?).

For that reason, we use Plausible. Plausible is a privacy friendly alternative to Google Analytics. Plausible does not sell user data to third parties and does not track user behaviour across external websites. It is a paid for service and is setup and managed by us which we then include in your monthly fee. We bulk buy pageviews from Plausible so you pay significantly less (a fraction of your monthly cost).

Plausible is made and hosted in the EU, is GDPR compliant and, most importantly, does not use cookies.

We use a managed PaaS hosting provider, this means that your website is containerised and managed by professionals who specialise in server management. We believe this setup is best for us and our clients. When servers need major updates or a software issue creeps in, a team of professionals are able to deal with it and rectify the situation quickly, there are no part time server tinkerers here!

Our CDN provider quickly and efficiently processes and serves you images from the closest server to the end user. Images are processed on the fly so that the person viewing your website views your images at the exact pixel dimensions they are viewing them at based on their screen size (no more oversized images!). 

This greatly reduces the file size of the images whilst maintaining image quality, meaning faster loading (often a 95% to 98% reduction in file size) and no more image resizing for you. We recommend you upload the original images where possible in their highest resolution (as long as they are smaller than 5999px on each side).

We also lazy load all of our images for even faster page loading!

Images are stored off site for faster loading and not bogging your website down with large files. We use low cost S3 storage which we then send through our CDN.