The best websites are usable websites. If it is hard to edit, it won't be.

You and your team have problems to solve, lives to improve, and insights to share. Struggling with editing your website or getting support to change some words isn’t on your agenda. We build website management to be intuitive, fast, and frictionless so you can focus on content creation and quick pivots.

Does your team prioritize flexibility and creativity, or lean towards brand consistency? Do you have personnel dedicated to communications or are you wearing too many hats to count? We want to know. Having considerable experience with a number of website platforms allows us to more effectively support your needs than single-tool agencies.

Our attention to website authoring experience and your unique position results in a high-functioning business asset that puts you in control.

Change is the only constant. Your website and architecture ought to be ready to respond.

Success here and now is only a starting point. We create your project to be ready when you are to grow and change whether it is today or years from now.

Keeping your tech light and lean makes it more durable, reliable, and easier to modify and extend. Keeping your stack simple offers widespread support and integration options open. Proactively minimizing bloat not only boosts your site performance but reduces operational and maintenance costs.

We are discerning when vetting technologies, platforms, and products to offer and support in addition to how we build with them. We know that down time and technical debt are hurdles to your business operations.

Building your website with a future-forward mindset keeps it highly adaptable to support your ongoing directions.

We maximize your vision’s potential with thoughtful tool selection.

The specific platform and tools used may not break your intent, but selecting ones that are aligned with your needs will maximize your investment and vision.

We have and continue to evaluate platforms and tools available into a curated set. We consider performance, customization, user experience, developer experience, available support and infrastructure, initial and ongoing costs, market adoption, and more.

We strategically utilize more than a single platform yet a limited number to support unique business needs while ensuring expert knowledge and experience with each. All while maintaining foundational skill with underlying technology that is transferable to a wide selection of tools.

WordPress: Flexibility and Broad Adoption

WordPress is the most popular platform for small to medium sized businesses. It has perhaps the longest legacy and widest support of the platforms we build with. With WordPress’s Gutenberg editor, content creation is extremely flexible. The amount of flexibility comes with additional effort and discipline required to create layouts and enter content for CMS users. The very wide adoption also requires some added scrutiny when it comes to sourcing vendors and plugins.
Because we are creating custom websites we use only a minimal amount of plugins, keeping your site focused while avoiding bloat and vulnerabilities.

If you prioritize content flexibility and are ready to roll up your sleeves a little to create new pages and layouts, Wordpress with the Gutenberg editor is a great option. If you prioritize a faster and easier Author Experience, design consistency, and very precise design execution, you may find another platform more appropriate.

Craft CMS: Customization and Curated Authoring

Craft CMS is geared toward highly custom and “art directed” builds. It is a common “next step” from WordPress both for web teams and businesses looking for highly customized, easy to use website projects. While WordPress was originally a blogging platform that makes a number of assumptions of what you are looking to do, Craft CMS has always been focused on creating websites and having a more minimal footprint when it comes to development decisions.

Craft CMS requires a more experienced developer compared to WordPress. Because of this, all things in the Craft CMS world are tighter than the WordPress world. You will find fewer available plugins, because developers are creating solutions for their project’s specific needs.

The authoring experience of Craft CMS is easier and faster than WordPress because it is less flexible and curated specifically to your project and design. The layouts are more tightly controlled, freeing up designers and developers to create exacting and complex layouts with minimal effort for CMS users.

Shopify: Dedicated Ecommerce Managed Service

Shopify is a dedicated SaaS (Software as a Service) ecommerce platform. It is the outright market leader for ecommerce needs for small, medium, and even large businesses. We highly recommend the managed SaaS for ecommerce opposed to self-hosted options. This puts a large amount of complex functionality and risks in the hands of Shopify who do it all day, every day.

If your ecommerce needs are a small part of your web needs, such as a donation form or a handful of items, Shopify could be a bit more than you would like to take on. We have a couple simpler options depending on your specific needs.

The major trade-off for Shopify's functionality and reliability, is that it has historically not been ideal for creating complex, custom marketing and editorial content. We have been on the search for a long time for an approachable platform competent and confident in both ecommerce and supporting marketing needs.

There are promising introductions and improvements in other platform integrations and even tooling created by Shopify that we continue to watch and research. However Shopify continues to be a critical piece of compelling commerce businesses paired with a separate platform for marketing needs.

Headless CMS & The Modern Stack: Speed and Architecture Flexibility

The headless architecture represents the edge of modern web development. It is an approach that decouples your content system (the CMS backend) from the public-facing front-end (the website). This opens up choices in both the CMS platform and the front-end technology to fit the needs of your projects, a developer’s preferences, and even multiple different front-end configurations.

In the past we viewed the complexity barrier of these stacks to be impractical for most small to midsized businesses. Combine that with a “wild west” period of time with new frameworks and products coming and going in the new market, it would take a magical seeing-stone to confidently be client advocates in selecting tools.

Now, the complexity barrier is dropping. Thanks to sustained technological maturity, competitive refinement, and wider community adoption, these modern systems are now more stable and accessible than before.
The website you are seeing right now is built with Payload CMS and a Next.js front-end!

Headless systems trade the single-tool simplicity of traditional CMSs for the flexibility of using best-in-class components for each component of your web needs.