Small on purpose.

The person who designs your site is the person who builds it. Nothing gets lost in a handover between a designer and a developer, because there isn’t one.

Liam Dargie

Design and development
Aberdeen, Scotland

I started writing code in 2020 because I wanted to make things, and started charging for it in 2021 when it turned out people wanted the things.

Since then it has mostly been small businesses in the north east: a combat sports gym, a stonemason, a flooring contractor, plus a line of software I build and sell myself. The common thread is that none of them wanted a website. They wanted the thing the website was in the way of: bookings, payments, prices they could change, a way to be found.

Self-taught, which means I learned by shipping things that broke and then fixing them. That turns out to be the useful kind of experience.

The other half of that is software I sell rather than build to order. It runs on thousands of servers, and Rockstar Games, the company behind Grand Theft Auto, certified me as an approved creator on their platform. A different world to a gym in Berryden, and exactly the same discipline: shipping to people you will never meet, who tell you immediately when something breaks.

What being small actually gets you

You talk to the person doing it

No account manager relaying your change request to someone you have never met. The reply comes from whoever is going to make it.

The design survives the build

Most of what goes wrong in a web project happens in the gap between the design and the code. There is no gap here.

You are not paying for an office

An agency with a floor of staff has to charge for the floor of staff. A gym in Berryden should not be funding that.

You should own it

Every repository and account is in your name from the first day. If you decide next year that you would rather work with someone else, you can. The handover is written so they can pick it up without ringing me.

No licence to keep paying for

The admin panel is part of what gets built. Nothing you pay afterwards buys permission to use it. There are running costs: hosting, a domain, and the service that delivers your form submissions. They are small, itemised, and told to you before you commit.

Say when it won't work

If a template will do the job for a few hundred pounds, that gets said on the first call. Talking someone into a build they do not need is a bad way to get a referral.

Check it, don't assume it

Contrast ratios get measured against the real background. Load time gets tested on a bad phone, not a good laptop. It is duller than having opinions and it is the reason the work holds up.

What it’s built with

Here because some clients ask, and because you should be able to hand this page to a developer and have them recognise it.

Next.js: Framework
TypeScript: Language
Postgres: Database
Prisma: Data layer
Stripe: Payments
Vercel: Hosting

No WordPress, no page builders, no plugin that stops being maintained and takes your site with it.

The other half

Alongside client work I build and sell my own software under the name DirkScripts, a product line with a storefront, automated licensing, a component library published to npm, and a support desk with paying customers in it.

It is the reason I know what an admin panel has to survive. People use software in ways nobody designed for, and they tell you about it at two in the morning. Everything learned there ends up in the client work.

Right now

Currently taking on new work

Tell us what you're trying to fix and we'll come back to you the same working day.

Tell us what’s broken.

Start a project

or just email hello@brannoch.com