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Studio

A small studio, on purpose.

You talk to the people who design and build your site. No account managers, no hand-offs, no one relaying messages. We take on fewer projects so each one gets done properly.

We work remotely with clients everywhere. The people on your first call are the people who put your site live.

The name

Why “half step”

A half step is the smallest interval in music: one key to the very next. On its own it sounds like nothing. Take it away and the melody goes wrong.

Websites work the same way. The spacing under a heading, how fast a menu opens, whether the form tells you what went wrong. Nobody notices those details until they’re missing. They are most of our job.

Our mark is two steps, the first exactly half the height of the second.

Principles

Five things we won’t trade.

  1. 01

    Fast is a feature.

    A site that loads in a second keeps the visitors a slow one loses.

  2. 02

    Hand-made beats templated.

    Every page is designed for your business, not filled into someone else’s theme.

  3. 03

    You own it.

    Your domain, your content and your code. Leave any time and we hand everything over.

  4. 04

    Motion with a reason.

    Animation guides the eye or explains a change. It never makes you wait to read.

  5. 05

    Plain words.

    On your site and in our emails. If we can’t say it simply, we haven’t understood it yet.

How we work

What a project feels like, week by week.

This is a typical Studio plan project. A Launch site moves faster; Signature work takes longer.

  1. Week 1

    Talk, then plan

    A call about your business and your customers. You get a written brief, a fixed quote and dates. Nothing starts until you’ve agreed to all three.

  2. Week 2

    Design in the browser

    We design the key pages as real, clickable pages, not slides. You see how it looks and moves on your own phone, and tell us what to change.

  3. Weeks 3–4

    Build, with a link you can check

    We build the rest of the site. Each week you get a short update and a private link to the work so far. Feedback goes straight to the person doing the work.

  4. Launch

    Go live, then hand over

    We test speed and accessibility, put the site live and show you how to edit your text. Then you choose: keep us on a Care plan, or take everything and go.

Tools

Few tools, chosen on purpose.

HTML
Written by hand, so pages load fast and read well to search engines and screen readers.
CSS
Layout, type and most of the motion, without a heavy framework underneath.
JavaScript
Only where it does something you would miss. The content works without it.
GSAP
The animation library we trust for smooth, precise motion that holds up on cheap phones.
WebGL
For the moments that need the graphics card, like the keys on our home page.
Cloudflare
Hosting on a global network: fast wherever your visitors are, with SSL included.
Stripe
For billing. Clear invoices and card payments, so paying us takes a minute.

Sound like the right size?

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