A note on doing it yourself
Some things shouldn't be DIY.
Templates have never been better. AI has never been more capable. Sometimes doing it yourself is exactly the right call, until it isn't.
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The honest bit
DIY is often the right answer.
Canva, Wix, Squarespace, Framer, the new wave of AI builders, these are good tools. They've made a decent website cheaper and faster to launch than at any point in history. For plenty of businesses, at plenty of stages, that's exactly the right decision. We'd tell you to use them, and we'd mean it.
- Fast to launch. A site live this week.
- Cheap to start. Sensible when budget matters more than fit.
- Capable. Templates and AI keep getting better. This isn't nostalgia for hand-coding.
- Right for the moment. A first site, an event, a side project, a test. All good reasons.
The turn
Then the website becomes part of the business.
The tool didn't get worse. Your situation got more demanding. The trouble with DIY rarely shows up on launch day. It shows up a few months later, in the gap between what you can do and what you now need.
- The marketing team can't touch the CMS without breaking the layout.
- There was never a content strategy. Just pages that accumulated.
- SEO gets harder as the structure works against you.
- Growth gets messy: more stakeholders, more exceptions, more workarounds.
- Accessibility and governance become obligations.
- The brand drifts a little further from itself with every quick edit.
What you're buying
You're not really buying a website.
You're buying the decisions it makes easier. A studio designs the thing you can see and the hundreds of small choices that come after it, when you're not in the room.
- Better future decisions, made faster.
- Less friction. For your team and your visitors.
- A CMS people enjoy using.
- A brand that scales without a rebuild.
- Content that stays organised as you grow.
- A site that gets easier to run over time.
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The short version.
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Send the rough version. A few clear sentences are enough to start.