Web Development Specialist

Most of the work is one of three things: a marketing site that has to explain a business and collect enquiries, a web application that does something specific, or an online store. They have different constraints and I build them differently.

A marketing site is a persuasion problem. The pages have to load fast, read clearly and lead somewhere. An application is a state problem: what happens when two people edit the same record, what happens when the network drops. A store is a trust problem, and everything from the product page to the checkout either builds trust or spends it.

The honest answer is that it depends on who edits the site after I hand it over. If the owner wants to publish blog posts and change copy without calling anyone, WordPress or Shopify will do that better than a custom build, and I will say so even when a custom build would be more interesting work.

React and Next.js make sense when the site has to do something the platforms cannot, when performance is the constraint, or when the design is specific enough that fighting a theme costs more than building it. The stack is a decision about maintenance, not about quality.

A launch is the point where you start finding out what is wrong, not the point where the work stops. I watch what real visitors do for the first few weeks: which pages they leave from, where the forms get abandoned, what the field data says about speed on the phones people actually use.

That is also when the technical SEO is worth checking, because a site that cannot be crawled or that renders slowly on mobile will not rank no matter how good the copy is. Fixing it at launch is far cheaper than fixing it a year later.