WordPress was the right answer for a long time, and for plenty of businesses it still is: bookings, memberships, several locations, a real publishing operation.

But a great many sites are running a content management system, a stack of plugins and a monthly maintenance bill in order to be a well-made brochure that changes four times a year.

Here's the question that usually settles it: who actually makes the changes on your site? If the honest answer is "I email someone" — and it nearly always is — then you're paying to maintain an editing system nobody is using.

We get paid for the recommendation, not for where it points. That's rather the point of asking us.

Properly means the functionality is built, not bolted on. It means the site is fast because of how it's made, rather than because a caching plugin is papering over the problem. It means someone else can pick it up in five years and understand it.

Most agencies reach for a plugin. Every plugin is another thing to update, another thing that can break, and another company whose business decisions quietly become your problem. Thirty years in IT makes you careful about what you take a dependency on.

We've built the complicated end of WordPress — multilingual sites, custom content types, real search and filtering, systems with genuine moving parts. Most business sites need far less than that. Yours might not.

So that's what we do. We build the site, we host it, and we keep it fast, patched and backed up. When you want something changed, you email us and it gets done — usually within a working day or two, and always without you having to chase.

There's nothing to log into, nothing to update, and very little that can break. It's cheaper to run than what you're on now, and considerably harder to hack, largely because most of what gets hacked simply isn't there.

We'll happily explain how it works if you're interested. Most people aren't, and that's rather the point.

The honest limit: if you've got people publishing content every week and they need to do it themselves, this isn't for you — and we'll say so rather than sell it to you anyway.

WordPress is flexible and affordable. The cost is the time it takes to do anything in it. A new landing page is an afternoon in a page builder, nudging spacing and fonts until it matches the rest of the site. Changing a price on a dozen pages means opening a dozen pages. AI tools can write the words, but somebody still has to paste them into WordPress and make them look right.

The usual shortcut is to give an AI tool an admin login. That's exactly what you shouldn't do.

So we do it properly. We set up the connection, teach Claude how your site is built, and put guardrails in place so it can only ever prepare work for you to approve. No wrestling with admin screens, and no AI holding the keys to your live site.

I've been on your side of this

In 2009 my wife had an idea, and I built the website for it. The Coaching Tools Company sold professional resources to coaches around the world, and for fifteen years I ran everything technical about it — the platform, the payments, the integrations, the search rankings, the hosting bills, and the outages that always arrived at the worst possible moment.

We took it from under $100,000 a year to more than $700,000, and sold the business in 2024.

Alongside it, from 2011, I ran Salt Spring Online Services — advising a deliberately small number of business owners on their own online operations, and running sessions at local meet-up groups. EDS isn't a new venture. It's the same work, done properly and under one name.

That's the part that matters here. Every judgement I now make for a client — is this plugin worth the risk, does this feature justify what it'll cost to maintain, will we regret this in three years — I have made before, with my own money on the line and no one to blame.

Your website isn't the hardest thing I've built

Before that, thirty years in enterprise technology. One of the largest Siebel deployments in the world at the time — 8,000 users at Prudential in London, reaching nine million customer records and more than twenty million product holdings. CRM and finance integration at Business Objects and SAP, including the systems consolidation after several acquisitions. A trading floor application at NatWest, a point-of-sale system at Ford, workflow at Fidelity. I started at Andersen Consulting — now Accenture — in 1992.

I mention it for one reason. When somebody tells you your website needs something complicated, it helps to be able to ask a person who has built genuinely complicated things whether yours is really one of them.