The studio
Four people and a
rather good machine.
We are a design agency in Rathdrum, Co. Wicklow. We are small on purpose and we built our own tooling so that being small is not a limit on what we can take on.
Why this exists.
A good small business in Ireland has two options. Pay an agency eight to twenty two thousand for a website, wait five months, and then discover that every change afterwards is billed by the hour. Or buy a template for a few hundred, spend a weekend fighting it, and end up with something that looks like forty thousand other businesses.
Both of those produce the same outcome eighteen months later: a website nobody has touched, with last year’s prices on it, that the owner is quietly embarrassed by.
The reason the good option does not exist is that agencies are expensive to run, so they need large one-off fees. We spent a year building the tooling that removes the expensive part, which is the repetitive part: the auditing, the research, the checking, the monitoring. What is left is the part that actually needs a person, which is the design, the photography, the words and the judgement about what to do next.
So we charge a monthly fee, we never stop working on it, and the business gets something that would have cost them a great deal more and would have stopped improving the day it launched.
Who you will actually deal with.
- Founder, design Denis Manzke Fifteen years designing for businesses that have to sell something at the end of it.
- Search and strategy Aoife Brennan Works out what people in your town are actually typing, and what it is worth.
- Build Cian Doherty Writes every line of the thing you get. No page builders, no themes.
- Words and photography Niamh Kelly Shoots the real room and writes the way you would say it out loud.
There is no account manager, because there are four of us. The person who designs your site is the person who answers when you ring.
How four people manage it
We automated the boring half of an agency.
Every agency does the same repetitive work on every job. We wrote software that does ours, which is the only reason these prices are possible without the quality going with them.
- The audit runs itself
- Your site, your competitors and your local search are measured by a tool we wrote, not by a junior with a spreadsheet. What used to be two days of somebody’s week is now twenty minutes.
- The research is already done
- We keep a written study of every trade we work in: what customers of a garden centre or a hotel actually search for, what they abandon, and what the good ones do. We are not starting from nothing on your job.
- Part of the standard is machine checked
- Fifty six rules. Nineteen of them are measurable, and those are checked on four screen sizes in light and dark on every single build. A person cannot do that reliably and no longer has to. The other thirty seven are judgement and still get a name against them.
- The watching is automatic
- Every live site we run is measured again every night. We usually know about a fault before the owner does.
We use software, including AI, for the repetitive part of the work. We do not use it to write your words or invent your photographs, and there is not a single stock image of a stranger on any site we have built. The output is the thing we stand over, and every page goes out over a person’s name.
Send us your web address.
We will look at your site, your competitors and what people near you are searching for, then design your new homepage and show it to you. Free, and yours to look at whether you hire us or not. If your site is doing fine as it is, we will tell you that instead.