Services

This is most of my work. Astro 5, Tailwind CSS 4, vanilla JavaScript. No React, no page builder, no bought theme. It ships as static HTML in an nginx container on Google Cloud Run in europe-west1 — nothing to log into, nothing to update weekly, nothing to hack. Fonts are self-hosted through Fontsource. Images run through astro:assets and sharp, and they are served from your own site rather than hotlinked off someone else's server. Sizes range from 8 pages to 30, and the bigger ones cost more than the figure below.

I measure your brand colours for contrast before I design with them, not after. Solar DNA's orange #FE9700 reads 2.18:1 as text — unreadable — so it became a fill-only token, with #AB6600 at 4.53:1 for any orange word. Wilton Plumbing's peach was being used as body text at 1.65:1 on their old site. Then I check the built output in headless Chrome: no horizontal overflow at 320, 390, 768 and 1440, and contrast pixel-sampled off the real rendered background rather than the hex code I hoped for.

Most small businesses run on copy-paste. An enquiry form arrives, someone retypes it into a spreadsheet, someone else forwards it to a WhatsApp group, and by Friday nobody knows which enquiries were answered. I wire the steps together so the retyping stops. Form to inbox to sheet. Enquiry to the right person's phone. Invoices, reminders and reports on a schedule. Data pulled out of one system and pushed into another without a human in the middle.

I want to watch the manual process once before I build anything. The automation is only worth paying for if it matches what actually happens, not what the process document says happens. Then I build for the day it breaks rather than the day it demos: every step logs what it did, failures show up instead of disappearing quietly, and a retry does not create a second copy of the same record.

In South Africa the first real conversation happens on WhatsApp. A plain wa.me link gets you a message that says Hi and nothing else, and then four more messages asking which product, which suburb, what size, what budget. A custom widget asks those questions on the page first and opens WhatsApp with the answers already written into the message. You reply once, with the context in front of you, and the lead arrives qualified.

I build the widget to your site rather than dropping in a plugin. Your fields, your wording, your colours — and WhatsApp's own brand green with their exact logo geometry on the button, not an approximation of it. It is one script on the page. No monthly subscription, and no third-party dashboard sitting between you and your own leads.

Every business has one spreadsheet holding up the roof. Six tabs, three people editing at once, a column nobody dares delete, and a formula that quietly broke in March. I turn it into a proper tool: real records instead of cells, permissions so the wrong person cannot overwrite the right data, a history of who changed what, and screens built for the job rather than for a grid.

Same engineering as the public sites. Every screen is checked at 320, 390, 768 and 1440, because the person doing a stock count is on a phone in a storeroom, not at a desk. Data gets the same scrutiny as colour. On the Custom Timber Decks build I typed Janka hardness as number-or-null, because composite decking has no Janka figure and printing 0 lbf would have been a lie. A blank is honest. A zero is not.

For when the thing you need does not exist as a product, or exists but charges more per month than building it once would cost. Booking systems, quoting engines, customer portals, calculators, job tracking. Software with users, logins and data behind it. I write it, I deploy it, and I am the person you phone when it misbehaves — there is nobody else on the line.

I work in small visible pieces. You get something running at a real URL early and watch it grow, instead of a status update claiming 70% complete. Verification is empirical: I drive the built application in headless Chrome with Puppeteer and check what actually rendered, because works-on-my-machine is not a test. Astro, Tailwind and vanilla JavaScript when the job is a site. Whatever the job genuinely needs when it is not.

The five above cover most of it, not all of it. The interesting work is usually the request that fits no category. It could be a screen that lives on a workshop wall, a script that renames forty thousand files without getting one wrong, a one-page tool built for a single event, or a piece of equipment that needs a web page to talk to it. If you can describe what should happen, I can usually work out how to make it happen.

The honest part: sometimes I will tell you not to build it. Now and then the answer is a product you already pay for, or a fifteen-minute change to how you do it now, and saying so costs me the job but keeps me worth phoning next time. If it is worth building, you get the scope and the price before you commit to anything. Start with a call — 065 911 1184. It costs nothing.