The showcase
The brief goes in. This comes out.
A website builder hands you a template and asks you to fill it in. Themesmith reads a brief and designs from it. Below is every site in the current batch: the brief we wrote, what the pipeline decided, and the site that came out. Nine of the trades appear more than once, from separate briefs, and three of them appear three times, which is the harder test: three electricians, three garages, three cleaning firms. Each entry lists its fonts and its colours, so the sets can be held against each other. No two sites in the same trade repeat a single colour, and no two of them arrived at the same design.
The businesses are invented: we wrote the briefs ourselves, to test how far the range goes across trades. The sites are real, and so is the pipeline that made them. Every link on this page opens a site that is live now.
37 of 37
home & garden
Fothergill & Daughters
The brief
Fifty-two years of leaded lights and listed-building glazing, and not one page of it online. The order book has run on architects' address books since 1974 — but those architects are retiring, and their replacements search before they specify. Being findable is now succession planning.
character: Austere, exact, third-generation. Fifty-two years of glass for listed buildings — spare words, fine tolerances, nothing decorative except the work.
What it did with it
The order book has run on architects’ address books since 1974, and those architects are retiring. Their replacements arrive at a page kept in the firm’s own register, lead and putty and limewash, where the services are entered as a numbered condition survey and every colour is light through Fothergill glass.
Nothing on the site is decorative except the glass.
from the build notes
type: MarcellusSwitzer
home & garden
Warmwell Insulation
What the design did
Most insulation sites open by selling insulation. This one opens with a wall you can drag between a thermal survey and the same brick in daylight, labelled where the heat is going, and one of those labels says the wall is solid nine-inch, cannot be cavity-filled, and can only be read.
It has a section called 'Sometimes insulation is not the answer', which is the opposite of what an insulation company's website is for.
from the build notes
type: ArchivoSource Sans 3
motoring
45 Minute Tyres
The brief
The chains make you drive to a waiting room; the mobile independents make you phone and hope. The postcode goes to whoever takes a driver from puncture to confirmed appointment fastest — the real race is speed of commitment, and nobody local is running it.
character: Clock-obsessed and cheerfully impatient. Speed is the product, the promise and the personality — brisk, modern, mobile, no waiting-room smell.
What it did with it
The name is a promise with a number in it, and customers already time the fitters from the kitchen window. So the number opens the page: a 44:59 clock at headline size, and beneath it a line saying the name is not marketing but a deadline.
A pit-wall timing screen relocated to a Swindon kerb: data as drama, seconds as currency, one amber light meaning help is here.
from the build notes
type: Barlow CondensedBarlow
home & garden
Verrill Industrial Electrical
The brief
Nobody here is buying an electrician. They are buying the shortest possible outage, because a stopped production line costs more in an hour than the whole electrical job costs.
character: Twenty-nine years of night shutdowns. Steel dust, lock-off keys, a line that must run by six — counts in minutes of downtime, not hours of labour.
What it did with it
What is being bought is the shortest possible outage, so the page is written as a shutdown window rather than a list of services. Three lines fill a night photograph of a food-production hall, one hi-vis figure a hundred feet down it, and the only thing to press says book the window.
Twenty-nine years of trading is stated as minutes of downtime, not as years.
from the build notes
type: Barlow CondensedIBM Plex Sans
site & outdoor
Marchbank Roofline
The brief
143 reviews and a striking number are from the same people twice: this is a route business wearing a trade's clothes. They mention the photographs more often than the gutters, because being shown the blockage is what makes an invisible job trustworthy.
character: Twelve years and a vacuum that reaches three storeys. Practical, photographic, quietly unimpressed by ladders.
What it did with it
Guttering is bought by people who cannot see the thing they are buying, which is why the reviews dwell on the photographs more than the work. The site makes the visitor do the climbing: the first screen is the gable of a real Chesterfield house, ground, first and second marked up it like a measuring staff, and scrolling rises the full three storeys to the gutter line, where the before and after of that run snaps into place.
The visitor physically scrolls the height Marchbank works at, and understands 'awkward access' in five seconds without reading a word of copy.
from the build notes
type: ArchivoArchivo
site & outdoor
Foul & Storm
The brief
Nobody wants photographs of what they do, including them. Firms pretending drainage is glamorous read as liars; this one's straight-faced humour about a filthy job is exactly what customers quote back in reviews, and a visitor should meet that same deadpan honesty from the first sentence.
character: Blunt and funny about a filthy job, deadly serious about doing it properly. No glamour, no pretending — straight talk from people who've seen worse.
What it did with it
Drain work does not photograph well and the firm knows it, which leaves one picture worth having: a survey frame from inside a Peterborough pipe, roots and all, with the camera’s distance reading still on it. The out-of-hours line sits on hazard tape below it.
Foul & Storm doesn't sell drainage; it shows you the inside of your pipe and tells you the truth about it.
from the build notes
type: AntonPublic Sans
home & garden
Quarrymoor Tiling
The brief
Stone is bought once and lived on for thirty years, so the decision is slow and evidence-hungry. Photographs of finished floors are worth less than photographs of the substrate being prepared.
character: Limestone, slate and the hiss of a wet saw. Slow, quiet work in rooms people are still living in, and a broom out before the van doors shut.
What it did with it
The one thing this trade never photographs is the unfinished job, and that is what fills the screen here: a Frome hallway shot from floor level, reclaimed flags dry-laid with the gaps still open between them, a spirit level and a pair of boots at the far end, a broom already leaning by the door. The name is cut across the middle in letterspaced Marcellus, and the heading further down says that old floors are not flat and that this is the point.
The site is a dry lay of the business: the work, the method, the 147 opinions, placed on the floor for you to walk over and judge.
from the build notes
type: MarcellusSource Sans 3
home & garden
Halliwell & Crowther
The brief
Half the order book is other tradesmen, and a builder choosing a joinery workshop is asking one question — will it fit on site without easing. That is a completely different sale from a homeowner choosing a joiner.
character: Seventy-two years in the same mill. Cutter grinder in the corner, sash weights, the smell of hot beech — unhurried, exact, faintly wary of hurry.
What it did with it
Half the order book is other tradesmen, and a builder asks one question a homeowner never does: will it fit on site without easing. The card sits on the mill itself, tabbed along the top like a drawing at scale 1:1, and the link under the headline goes to a profile match rather than to a gallery.
It is the only site here that admits it sells to two different customers and builds a section called One mill, two counters.
from the build notes
type: BaskervvilleArchivo
home & garden
Field Notes Landscapes
The brief
Local landscapers sell labour by the day. Field Notes sells a finished picture and what it becomes by year three. The day-rate comparison only stops once a visitor has truly seen the difference — October gardens that outshine June ones — and nobody else in the county can show that.
character: Quietly artistic, few of words. Would rather show a garden in October than describe it in June — reserved, observant, confident the work speaks.
What it did with it
They photograph every garden through four seasons and then crop the results into squares. Here one frame fills the screen with nothing over it but the month, the garden’s second year, and a valley in Stroud.
October is the sales pitch; June never needs to speak.
from the build notes
type: NewsreaderNewsreader
home & garden
Ash & Alder
The brief
A garden is bought on a photograph and judged over five years, and the gap between those two things is where most garden firms lose people. Showing the same border across seasons is the whole argument.
character: Soil in March, cut grass in July, bare stems in November. Plants a border for what it looks like in five years, not on the day it is finished.
What it did with it
Everyone in this trade leads with June, so this site refuses to pick a month. The first screen is split down the middle by one border photographed twice from the same spot: foxgloves and geraniums on the left, the same ground under hard frost on the right, labelled July and January, captioned one camera position, six months apart. Field Notes Landscapes is the same trade from a different brief, and where that site chose its single best frame, this one will not choose at all.
Nothing terracotta, nothing acid, nothing that couldn't be found within ten feet of a Ludlow border.
from the build notes
type: EB GaramondEB Garamond
home & garden
Ridgeworth Home Extensions
The brief
Nobody chooses this firm because they liked them. They choose it because it is the only quote with a completion date on it, and because a homeowner nine weeks from having no kitchen is buying certainty rather than craftsmanship.
character: Four crews, ninety builds a year, a finish date written into the contract. Scaffold Monday, skip on the drive, dust everywhere — loud about price, no charm.
What it did with it
A homeowner nine weeks from losing their kitchen is buying certainty, not craftsmanship, and the page is arranged to say so before anything else. Fixed price, fixed date, it is in the contract, set at the size a hoarding would use, and directly beneath it a real build with the figure attached: rear extension, Penn Fields, £52,400, fixed.
The price board is set in Anton at poster size and the contract clauses are printed underneath it as clauses — the one site here that leads with money and does not apologise for it.
from the build notes
type: AntonPublic Sans
home & garden
Hollow & Hearth
The brief
Domestic cleaning is bought on trust with keys and a house, and sold almost everywhere on hourly rates. The decision is who is standing in the hall, not what it costs.
character: The smell of a house an hour after we have gone. The same two people, the same day, and a kitchen you want to stand in rather than tidy.
What it did with it
Nobody is cleaning anywhere on this site. The first screen is a Malvern kitchen an hour after the visit, green-painted and empty, a kettle still steaming beside one mug, the hills showing through a sash window, and the only sentence on it is the smell of a house an hour after we have gone. The site never prints its rating as a figure either: the reviews arrive as a ribbon you pull from 2015 to this week, one dated line at a time.
The house after, never the cleaning during.
from the build notes
type: SentientSentient
home & garden
Madoc the Joiner
The brief
The established joiners around Wrexham lead with decades he doesn't have. He can't out-year them; he can out-care them — same-day replies, honest prices, his own name on every job. A visitor should feel the hunger of a man building a reputation on purpose, not the thinness of a start-up.
character: Three months in and honest about it. Earnest, hungry, personal — twelve years on the tools for others, now every job carries his own name.
What it did with it
Three months trading and eight reviews is not a heritage story, so the design does not tell one. What fills the first screen is an empty alcove with his setting-out lines still on the plaster and a note reading ‘Wall 12mm out. They all are.’
The site is his first alcove: the awkward gap of being new, filled with something made properly.
from the build notes
type: Archivo NarrowFira Sans
studios
Cuttle & Ink
The brief
87 reviews and not one mentions price. They mention crying happily, healed photographs at six weeks, and travelling down from London. Customers already treat it as a destination, and a first-time visitor should arrive at the same conclusion.
character: Dark, art-first, quietly intense. Two artists, monthly booking drops, no walk-ins. Serious about craft, allergic to high-street tattoo clichés.
What it did with it
Bookings open once a month and are gone in a weekend, and until now the queue lived in an Instagram inbox. The next open date now takes the whole first screen, set at the size a poster would use, with one thing to do underneath it.
Beneath the date, one quiet line of ledger type: '5.0 across 87 reviews' — stated once, never repeated, never badged.
from the build notes
type: CormorantNewsreader
home & garden
Fenwick Compliance Plumbing
The brief
The customer is a property manager with a spreadsheet and a compliance deadline, and they are not buying plumbing — they are buying the certainty that no certificate in a portfolio of ninety will lapse on their watch.
character: Two thousand certificates a year and a wall of renewal dates. Speaks in portfolios, key safes and access notes — clerical, exact, faintly bureaucratic.
What it did with it
A property manager holding ninety certificates and a compliance deadline is not shopping for a plumber, so there is no plumber on the page. The first screen is the renewal register itself: seven properties by reference number, each with the certificate due date, the visit already arranged, and a stamp beside it reading booked.
The hero is a wall of renewal dates rather than a photograph, and the site addresses a lettings desk throughout.
from the build notes
type: SwitzerSwitzer
home & garden
Pennant Electrical
The brief
Rewiring is bought on trust about mess and disruption, not on price. The customer's real question is what their house will look like on the last evening, and almost nobody answers it.
character: Old houses, floorboards up, the smell of perished rubber cable. Careful in other people's homes — dust sheets down before anything else.
What it did with it
What the customer is frightened of is the mess, not the bill, so there is no electricity anywhere on the first screen. One oak board has been eased up out of an otherwise immaculate floor with a work lamp burning in the hole beneath it, the dust sheets are folded at the edge of the frame, and the navigation is the job in order: the method, old rubber and new copper, the houses we know, put back as found.
The camera behaves the way Pennant behaves — respectfully, without disturbing anything.
from the build notes
type: Cabinet GroteskSource Sans 3
site & outdoor
Bellhouse Roofing Contractors
The brief
The buyer is an estates officer with a pre-qualification questionnaire, not a homeowner with a leak. They will look this firm up at nine at night, on a phone, next to three other names on a tender list, and decide in about a minute whether it is worth the paperwork.
character: Sixty-eight years, three generations, fourteen vans. Lead, parapet gutters, school roofs done in August — institutional, unhurried, procurement-literate.
What it did with it
An estates officer arrives with a pre-qualification questionnaire, so the home page answers it before being asked. The firm files a condition report on itself, sheet 01 of 08: established 1958, three generations, fourteen vans, ten million pounds of public liability, on a rule running from 1958 to this year.
The homepage opens as a condition report cover sheet, and the section that would be a gallery anywhere else is called Entries Since 1958.
from the build notes
type: ArchivoSource Sans 3
site & outdoor
Hold Fast Tree Work
The brief
Most local outfits are one man and a saw who won't touch the big dismantles. Hold Fast climbs what others refuse — cranes, storm-cracked hardwoods over roofs. A caller with a frightening tree must know they've reached the crew that says yes, and that the swagger comes with method statements.
character: Outdoor swagger with method statements. Calm in high places, happiest on the jobs others turn down — adrenaline fully under control.
What it did with it
Half the reviews describe watching the climb and half describe a storm call answered within the hour. The picture is a two tonne stem hanging over a roof, and the arithmetic holding it is drawn onto the photograph: pick point, section weight, drop zone clear.
Hold Fast is the rigger's promise: nothing moves until it's meant to, and then it lands exactly where the plan said it would.
from the build notes
type: AntonPublic Sans
motoring
Bilton Yard
The brief
A village garage's asset is forty years of the same families, and none of it is visible to anyone searching from outside. The site's job is to make an insider's reputation legible to a newcomer.
character: A yard that smells of oil and hot brake dust, a dog asleep under the desk, and whoever is stuck at the roadside goes first.
What it did with it
Forty-eight years of the same families is worth nothing to a stranger searching from outside, so the page hands them the evidence instead. A mud-caked pickup sits on the ramp with the yard dog asleep beneath it, the promise is set in transport lettering at the size it would be painted on a gable, and a line of ledger type under it carries 4.8 from 431 opinions, est. 1978, recovery within twenty miles. Further down is a shelf of worn parts, each one captioned with the noise it was making and whether the quote moved.
Anything that looks like marketing will read as a lie.
from the build notes
type: ArchivoHanken Grotesk
food & drink
Hollow
The brief
Eighteen seats and one sitting means the site is not competing for passing trade; it is managing disappointment. Most people who find it cannot get a table for six weeks, and what they do next depends entirely on whether the page makes waiting feel deliberate rather than like being turned away.
character: Eighteen seats, one sitting, booked on the first. Fermentation crocks, sea fret off the harbour, a chalked list — exact rather than minimal, never sorry.
What it did with it
Most people who find this restaurant cannot get a table for six weeks, so the page manages that before it sells anything. Eighteen seats, one sitting at seven, and £95 with nothing added to the bill are the whole of the first screen, and the booking button names the month it is actually open for.
It puts the price in the first line and the fact that you probably cannot get in just under it.
from the build notes
type: Barlow Semi CondensedSupreme
home & garden
Ta-Ra Removals
The brief
They move sixty households a week at the cheapest rate in Leeds and are proud of the number — yet today it hides behind a quote form. A visitor should never have to ask what it costs; the price is the promise, and everything else is proof the crew turns up on time.
character: Loud, cheap, proud, Yorkshire. Publishes its prices, hates quote-form games, brings a bit of cheek. Market-stall confidence, zero corporate polish.
What it did with it
The cheapest hourly rate in Leeds was the whole argument, and a quote form was hiding it. £45 an hour now sits larger than the firm’s own name, beside a chalked board of this week’s free days, above a price list where stairs and fuel are entered as £0.
The whole site is the side of the van and the front of the stall — everything painted on, nothing hidden behind a form.
from the build notes
type: AntonArchivo
home & garden
Harlow & Vane
The brief
43 reviews in seventeen years because there have only been two hundred clients — and the same arc recurs: nervousness about the spend, then relief at being calmly walked through it. A first-time visitor should feel that same de-escalation begin before anyone from the studio has spoken to them.
character: Quiet luxury. Unhurried, spare, certain. Never persuades, never discounts, assumes taste — the calm of the showroom in everything it says.
What it did with it
Fourteen rooms a year, every one of them by referral, meant the site had to stop selling. It opens as sheet 01 of a drawing set, corner marks and title block and scale, and the only sentence on that screen is about how the kitchen gets drawn.
They have already visited the glossy national showrooms and found them loud.
from the build notes
type: SwitzerSwitzer
site & outdoor
Ironopolis Scaffolding
The brief
Sixty-one reviews from sixteen years looks thin until you read the bylines — site agents and project managers, naming jobs and dates. In this market a dozen named contractors outweigh a thousand anonymous stars, and the firm should be judged on exactly that professional record.
character: Industrial, capable, contract-serious. Talks programmes, inspections and tonnage, never lifestyle — Teesside steel in the voice, built for site managers.
What it did with it
The person being persuaded here is a contracts manager pricing a package, not a homeowner. Nothing on the page is aimed at a house: it opens on a sheet stamped issued for construction, revision C, with a 24 hour make-safe line next to the pricing button.
The site is not a brochure about scaffolding — it is the drawing pack itself, cover sheet to pricing form, revision C, checked and dated.
from the build notes
type: Big ShouldersArchivo
site & outdoor
Kestrel Access Scaffolding
The brief
A householder hires scaffolding once in their life and has no idea what they are buying. Every enquiry opens with the same three questions — how long can I keep it, what will it do to my drive, and what happens if the roofer is rained off.
character: Two men and a lorry, domestic only. Boards carried through the hall when there is no side access — patient with people who have never hired scaffolding.
What it did with it
A householder hires scaffolding once and does not know what to ask, so the site answers the three questions before they are put. It is set on a Hereford terrace with no way round the back, the sentence under the headline is about carrying the boards through the house, and the walk-through below is annotated by hand.
The only site in the set with a handwriting face, used for the annotations on the walk-through, and the hero is scaffold boards being carried through somebody's hall.
from the build notes
type: Cabinet GroteskHanken Grotesk
site & outdoor
Four Square Paving
The brief
214 reviews with a recurring plot: braced for a big bill, talked into a smaller job. “They talked us out of ripping up the drive” is the single most persuasive sentence a paving firm can own, and it belongs to them — every wary homeowner should get to hear it.
character: Fed up with doorstep cowboys and says so. Blunt, protective, patient — fixed written prices, no pressure, no deposits, everything squared away properly.
What it did with it
Driveways are the trade the doorstep scam made famous, and the answer here is behaviour rather than badges. Three short lines carry the top of the page, fixed price, in writing, before we start, and the strip below reads no deposits, ever.
The name Four Square is the idea: plumb, level, honest, and on paper.
from the build notes
type: ArchivoSource Sans 3
home & garden
Kelvin & Wren
The brief
187 reviews with an odd signature: customers quote figures back — “a 0.4-ohm fault two others missed”, “a fourteen-page test report”. When clients brag about documentation, the documentation is the reputation, and every promise the firm makes should be as checkable as its certificates.
character: Engineering-precise, proud of the paperwork. Calm, technical, quietly modern — tested twice, documented once, explained in numbers. No exclamation marks.
What it did with it
Customers keep these quotes and hire off them, itemised circuit by circuit with the test values promised up front. The rating on the page is set as 4.9/5.0, n=187, inside a specification table, and the photograph is captioned like a figure in a report, down to the 7kW supply.
Kelvin & Wren's site behaves like the documentation it promises: a calibration label on a well-made instrument.
from the build notes
type: ArchivoArchivo
food & drink
Trattoria Perlini
The brief
Forty-three years of regulars can't gift, book or recommend what they can't link to — the web presence is a PDF menu from 2019 with the wrong Sunday hours. The family's warmth has to survive the journey onto a screen, so that a stranger feels like a regular before they've been once.
character: Warm, family-proud, gently nostalgic. Second-generation, Nonna's recipes, regulars greeted by name — more heart than polish, and proud of that too.
What it did with it
A restaurant trading since 1983 was being represented online by a PDF. The home page answers with a date instead: this morning’s pasta, made by hand, printed over a photograph of the floured bench.
A 1983 recipe, made fresh at seven this morning — flour and walnut with one yolk of gold, a Bolton kitchen that greets you by name.
from the build notes
type: Young SerifAlegreya
studios
Noreen’s Hair & Beauty
The brief
914 reviews and “remembers” does the heavy lifting — the parting, the grandchildren's names, the holiday mentioned in March. Not one review mentions price. What's being bought is recognition, and anyone new should understand that's what they're being offered.
character: The town's living room since 1996. Warm, chatty, unpretentious — thirty years of regulars, everyone's name remembered, nobody ever intimidated.
What it did with it
Nobody walking through that door is buying a transformation; they are buying being remembered. The photograph across the top runs from a girl in the chair to a woman having her silver set, and the rating line adds that most of the 914 are people the salon knows by name.
None of them are shopping for glamour — they are shopping for being known.
from the build notes
type: Bree SerifAtkinson Hyperlegible
studios
Fifth Floor
The brief
The reviews talk about being told no — about a colourist who explained why a two-step lift was wrong that day and rebooked it. Honesty about what hair can take is the register, and it is the opposite of a salon that says yes to everything.
character: Five years, three colourists, appointment only. Direct about what hair can take — the studio that says no and reschedules the lift.
What it did with it
The reviews here praise being turned down, and one of them describes a colourist refusing a lift and rebooking it. That refusal became the structure: a navigation item reading what we say no to, and a correction told as a dated diary that opens on 5 March with the word no and does not reach the finished head until 11 June. Noreen’s is the same trade from a different brief, and the two sites do not share a single decision.
The strand test as manifesto: a near-monochrome studio in which the only colour on the page is colour they have actually put in hair.
from the build notes
type: ArchivoArchivo
home & garden
Nightfall Contract Cleaning
The brief
The buyer is a business manager at a multi-academy trust, and their nightmare is not a poor clean — it is arriving at half seven to a room that was not touched, with two hundred children due in an hour.
character: Forty-one cleaners nobody ever sees. Empty corridors at five in the morning, alarm codes, key logs — operational, unglamorous, never once about sparkle.
What it did with it
The fear the brief names is arriving at half seven to a room nobody touched, so the answer is a log rather than a photograph of anybody cleaning. It opens at 21:45 with keys signed out, runs down an empty school corridor lit by one open door, and finishes at 07:42 with the building ready.
A cleaning company site with no sparkle, no before-and-after and no smiling staff photograph: the staff section is called The forty-one nobody sees.
from the build notes
type: ArchivoPublic Sans
motoring
Caldew Bridge Garage
The brief
Split the reviews at March 2024 and it's two different garages: 3.6 under the old owner, 4.9 across the 150 since. The average tells the dead story; the break tells the true one. A visitor who never learns about the handover has judged the wrong garage — and the town is full of people still doing exactly that.
character: Under new management and says so, plainly. Humble, transparent to a fault, quietly determined — a garage rebuilding trust one photographed job at a time.
What it did with it
A garage rebuilding a reputation cannot ask to be trusted, so this one does not ask. The headline is that they photograph the part before they touch it, and the picture under it is a worn brake disc on the bench with the wear ringed in red marker.
Every gram of gloss subtracts trust; every gram of specificity adds it.
from the build notes
type: ArchivoArchivo
home & garden
Kubiak Locks
The brief
Seventeen years, one man, and the phone is the entire business — answered personally at 3am, on Boxing Day, every night in between. His livelihood is whether a panicking stranger on a doorstep can find him and feel certain enough to dial within thirty seconds of searching.
character: One man, one van, seventeen years of answering his own phone at 3am. Urgent, plain, unadorned — every word says: call now, he will pick up.
What it did with it
The whole business is whether a stranger on a doorstep at 3am believes a person will answer. The page reads the Walsall clock back to them, says the locksmith answers and never a call centre, and sets ring now at the size it would be painted on the van.
Whatever hour you land, the site looks you in the eye and confirms the one thing you're worried about: he picks up now.
from the build notes
type: Big ShouldersHanken Grotesk
motoring
Ganton Motorhome Services
The brief
The whole business is one calendar problem. Everybody wants their van ready for March and nobody wants it touched in November, so half the year is turning people away and the other half is looking for work.
character: Every customer wants March. Damp meters, sealant, vans laid up under covers all winter — cheerful about rot, blunt about the waiting list.
What it did with it
Everybody wants their van ready for March and nobody wants it touched in November, so the site sells a place in a queue rather than a service. The button says get on the list, the reviews are counted as reviews on record, and every damp reading is written down, dated, and set against last year's.
The site's whole argument is a ledger of which months are free, because the business problem is not winning a booking, it is moving one out of March.
from the build notes
type: Archivo NarrowSource Sans 3
studios
Biscuit & Bubbles
The brief
268 five-star reviews and the dogs are named in nearly all of them — “Alfie now pulls TOWARDS the door”. Owners write as their dogs, and the reviews read like a comedy account with a serious spine. That voice is the brand, ready-made, and newcomers should get to hear it immediately.
character: Soft, silly, besotted with dogs — puns welcome, biscuits on arrival. Under the whimsy, serious gentle-handling expertise, especially for nervous dogs.
What it did with it
The owners who need this place most are the ones with a nervous dog and a dread of the phone call. The headline gives the dog the time rather than a price list, and the one thing to click is a free meet and sniff.
One dog at a time in the studio; one idea at a time on the page.
from the build notes
type: Baloo 2Nunito Sans
professional
Nice Numbers
The brief
Their clients are illustrators, brewers and wedding photographers who chose them precisely because they don't feel like accountants — and the current site greets those people with “comprehensive compliance solutions”. The moment a visitor smells accountancy-speak, the entire reason to switch evaporates.
character: Bright, warm, plain-spoken, faintly cheeky. Accountancy for people who'd rather be making things — jargon-free, human, nothing navy about it.
What it did with it
The brief’s complaint was that Glasgow holds four hundred accountancy firms and roughly 396 navy websites. There is no navy anywhere on this one: warm off-white, a single marigold highlighter, and a headline about people who would rather be making things.
Charm wins the design-literate freelancer in two seconds; the graph-paper order underneath reassures them at self-assessment time.
from the build notes
type: Cabinet GroteskKarla
home & garden
On the Level Plumbing
The brief
Across 296 reviews the word “comfortable” does the heavy lifting: “first trade visit I didn't dread”, “explained without the eye-roll”. Exact-time arrivals get more mentions than price. Ease is the product, and a visitor should feel their shoulders drop a little just from how the firm talks.
character: Women-led and matter-of-fact about it. Reassuring, punctual, straightforward — for anyone who wants to feel completely at ease about who's in their home.
What it did with it
Women-led is why half the callers pick up the phone, and it had been sitting in a footer. It is now in the opening sentence, and the exactness the customers praise became the headline: arrival at 8:40, not sometime in the morning.
type: ArchivoHanken Grotesk
home & garden
MintDoor Cleaning
The brief
208 local reviews split cleanly: the five-stars name the same cleaner visit after visit; the rare three-stars describe a rota change nobody warned them about. Consistency is what's actually being bought, and the business should be chosen — and judged — on exactly that promise.
character: Systematised and reassuring, corporate-tidy with a warm local face. Uniforms, checklists, vetted staff — the same clean, every visit, guaranteed.
What it did with it
A national template that could be about any town was the thing to beat. The card on the front of the site names Milton Keynes, Bletchley and Newport Pagnell, and what it promises is the same cleaner on the same day rather than anything about the company.
The whole site reads like MintDoor's own paperwork made beautiful: a round card, a key log, a checklist that ticks itself off in front of you.
from the build notes
type: QuicksandSource Sans 3
Earlier work
Three sites from an earlier batch, kept for registers the trades above don't cover: a gastropub, a patisserie, a bookshop. They were built before we started keeping the brief and the design notes with each site, so there is nothing to read here but the sites.
The Copper Fox
the-copper-fox-395e93c4.sites.themesmith.ai
La Quinzaine
la-quinzaine-694e1d36.sites.themesmith.ai
Cormorant & Quill
cormorant-quill-77dea39b.sites.themesmith.ai
Day one is the easy part.
Everything above is day-one output: a brief becoming a live site inside a day. The subscription is about every day after. The site is watched, small problems get fixed before you meet them, and improvements are proposed as the business changes: new pages, better headlines, fresher photographs. A site that was built in a day, and doesn't stand still afterwards.
Tell us about your business.
Write a paragraph about what you do and who it is for. We build the site from it, and you see it before anyone else does.