Most agencies in this city build on a page builder, hand you a six-megabyte homepage, and call it custom.
We write the theme. Every site we ship is built from scratch in PHP, JavaScript and CSS — GSAP for motion, Three.js where a build earns it, Lenis for scroll. The result loads in under two seconds on a phone and looks like it cost more than it did.
The site you’re reading is one of ours. That’s the portfolio piece we’d point at first.
What “custom” actually means here
No page builder. No purchased theme with the demo content swapped out. No stack of plugins held together with hope.
When you own the theme, you own the performance. A page builder has to be able to render anything anyone might ask of it, so it ships the code for everything whether your page uses it or not. A hand-built theme ships exactly what your site needs and nothing more. In practice that difference is three or four seconds of load time — and load time is a ranking factor and a conversion factor at the same time.
It also means nothing is off-limits. If the design calls for it, we build it. We’re not working around what a plugin will allow.
What we build
Restaurant and hospitality sites
Menus that load instantly on a phone on transit data. Reservation and online-ordering integration wired in rather than bolted on. Location pages built to be found in local search. We’ve done this thirty times; the problems are familiar.
E-commerce
WooCommerce, properly. Custom checkout flows, bundle builders, membership and loyalty logic, referral tracking that attributes revenue to the right source. We’ve built age-gated retail with province-based pricing tied to federal duty rules, and a fragrance catalogue running several hundred SKUs with an email-gated members’ tier.
Brand and campaign sites
Scroll-driven, WebGL, the cinematic end. For when the website is the pitch and has to do the persuading before anyone speaks to you.
Rebuilds and rescues
You have a site, it’s slow, it doesn’t convert, and the developer who built it has stopped answering. We’ve taken over more of these than we’d like.
Speed is a feature, not an upsell
- Core Web Vitals inside Google’s thresholds on mobile, verified before launch rather than promised after
- Images served as WebP, correctly sized and lazy-loaded
- Critical CSS inlined, everything else deferred
- Clean semantic HTML — one H1, a real heading hierarchy, proper landmarks
- Schema markup wired in from day one
- Hosting on a tuned VPS behind a CDN, not shared hosting
We don’t hand over a slow site and then sell you a performance package. It’s fast when you get it.
How a build runs
Discovery
We work out what the site has to do before anyone opens a design tool. Who it’s for, what action it needs to produce, what’s currently in the way.
Design
Flat design of every key template, signed off before a line of code is written. Changing a layout in design costs an hour. Changing it in build costs a week.
Build
Hand-coded, with a staging link you can watch progress on. You see it come together rather than waiting for a reveal.
Launch
Redirect map for every old URL so you don’t lose rankings, tracking verified, forms tested end to end, and a walkthrough recorded so you can find things later.
Handover
Files, documentation, and admin fields set up so you can change content without touching code. Maintain it with us or take it in-house — it’s your theme, cleanly commented, no lock-in.
Frequently asked questions
What does a custom website cost?
It depends on how many templates need designing, whether e-commerce or custom functionality is involved, and how much content you already have. A brochure site sits at one end; a WooCommerce build with compliance requirements and membership tiers sits at the other and can be several times the price. We quote fixed, not hourly, and give you the number after one conversation.
How long does it take?
Four to eight weeks for most builds. Larger e-commerce projects run eight to twelve. The variable is almost always how quickly content and photography come back from your side — that’s where projects stall.
Can I edit it myself?
Yes. We build custom admin fields so you can change menus, prices, hours and content without touching code, and without being able to accidentally break the layout.
Will you work on my existing site?
Yes — audits, rebuilds, migrations and rescues. If you’re on a page builder and it’s slow, a rebuild is often cheaper than optimising your way out of it. We’ll tell you honestly which one your situation calls for.
Do I own everything?
Completely. Code, repository, domain, hosting, analytics — all in your name from day one, and all of it leaves with you if you go.