How we work · The studio process
Five phases. Zero surprises. One team the whole way.
Our process is built around one stubborn rule: the team that pitches you is the team that ships. No offshore handoffs, no junior re-staffing after the SOW, no AI on the keyboard pretending to be a human. Here’s what working with us actually looks like, week by week.
The phases
From kickoff to ongoing, in five steady moves.
PHASE 01 · DISCOVERY · 4–6 WEEKS
Six weeks of listening before we draw a single screen.
Stakeholder interviews across every department that touches the site. A full content audit. Editor shadowing in your existing CMS. Competitive teardowns. Analytics review. Governance mapping. By the end you have a written project scope (often different from the original RFP) and a roadmap your provost or director can defend.
PHASE 02 · DESIGN · 6–10 WEEKS
Design system first. Pages second.
Brand evolution, type stack, color tokens, component library, and accessibility constraints baked in before we touch a single page. Reviewable in Figma, governable forever.
PHASE 03 · BUILD · 8–16 WEEKS
Built by senior humans.
No offshore handoffs. The engineers who pitched you write the code. WCAG 2.2 enforced from day one.
PHASE 04 · LAUNCH · 2–4 WEEKS
Zero-downtime migration.
Thousands of pages migrated with full SEO inheritance, redirects, and editor training in parallel.
PHASE 05 · SUSTAIN · ONGOING
We don’t disappear after launch.
Our programs model picks up where the project ends. Quarterly sprints, accessibility monitoring, optimization. You keep the team that knows your site inside out.
Hard-won opinions · est. 2008
What 18 years has taught us.
These aren’t “values” written by committee. They’re the six things we’ve stopped arguing about, usually because a client project taught us the lesson the hard way.
01
The brief is rarely the problem.
Every RFP says “we need a redesign.” Most don’t. They need a governance model, a content strategy, or a clearer audience. Our first six weeks on any project is figuring out which one.
02
We refuse to pick a CMS side.
Most agencies make you fit their stack. We pick the right tool for your actual problem. Sometimes that’s Drupal. Sometimes WordPress. Sometimes both, in the same organization.
03
Design for the editor in year four.
The person logging into the CMS in 2030 wasn’t in the kickoff. Every block, every field, every label is designed for them, not for the launch demo.
04
WCAG is a constraint, not a checklist.
Accessibility isn’t a phase we tack on at the end. It’s the limit we design from. Sites built that way are usually faster, simpler, and better for everyone, not just the people who need them most.
05
AI is a tool. It is not the strategy.
We don’t pitch AI roadmaps. We build small AI workflows that solve one boring problem really well, then we build the next. The companies winning with AI in 2030 won’t be the loudest about it now.
06
Stay past launch.
Most agencies sell projects. We sell relationships. Our average client stays eight years. That number is the entire business model, and it’s why the launch is the easy part of working with us.
200+
Sites launchedWe remember every one.
18 yrs
In businessMostly the same humans.
50M+
Pages served / yearLoaded by people we’ll never meet.
99.9%
UptimeWe’ve earned the .9, thank you.
On the work beneath the work
Our work with KWALL isn’t just a CMS change. It’s been a capability change: components, accessible markup, and authoring that delivers quality by default.
Made it to the bottom? You’re our kind of person.
Two ways from here. Skim the work and see if we’d be a fit, or send a quick note through the form. The founder reads them.
p.s. we will respond. by Tuesday at the latest.