A website designed around your business — not a theme.

Less drawing than most people expect, and more deciding. The job starts with structure: which pages your business needs, what each page must say, and what a visitor should do at the end of it. Then hierarchy — making sure a skimming reader catches the right three things in the right order. Only then does the visual layer happen: typography, colour, imagery and layout that make those decisions legible and give the brand its feel.

On a 3 Lions build the same team also writes the copy, produces or reworks the imagery, and builds the pages, so the design survives contact with reality instead of being handed off and diluted.

A template is a layout someone designed for nobody in particular, which you then pour your business into. It is fast and cheap, and it shows: your structure bends to fit the theme, you carry code for features you never use, and you look like every other business that bought it.

Custom design starts from your buyer and your argument, so the structure fits the business instead of the other way round. It also means the site carries only the code it needs, which is most of why custom builds are faster. Templates are a fine choice for a hobby project or a placeholder. For a business whose site is supposed to win work, the difference is usually visible in the enquiry rate.

You need one when the site has a commercial job: winning enquiries, bookings or sales in a market where buyers compare you against competitors. You probably do not need one if the site is a formality — a menu and opening hours, a landing page for a side project, a one-event microsite. In those cases a well-configured simple setup is the honest recommendation, and we have told plenty of people exactly that on a first call.

A freelancer usually does one part well — design, or code, or copy — and you assemble the rest. An agency does everything but through layers: account managers, handoffs, and a junior doing the actual work. We are a small senior studio: the people you talk to do the design, the words, the build and the search thinking as one job. That is why the quote is fixed, the timeline is real, and nothing gets lost between vendors.

A focused business site — five to ten genuinely designed pages — typically runs a few weeks from kickoff to launch, with the pace set less by design and build than by how quickly content decisions and feedback come back. Larger sites, e-commerce builds and migrations run longer. We scope it precisely on the first call and give you a real timeline before starting; the timeline then holds unless the scope changes, and if it changes we say so in writing, not in the invoice.

Three things, honestly delivered: facts about the business (services, areas, what makes you better — we interview you for this, you do not have to write it), whatever material exists (photos, logos, old copy, brochures), and decisions at two or three review points. The single biggest cause of delayed launches is feedback that takes three weeks. If you can turn reviews around in days, the project moves like it should.

The process is built so revisions happen where they are cheap: at the design stage, on real layouts, before production code exists. There we iterate until the direction is signed off — that is the point of the stage, not a numbered allowance. Once pages are built, changes within the agreed scope are included; new scope (extra pages, a new section type, a rethink of a signed-off direction) is quoted separately before we do it. Nobody gets surprised by an invoice.

Real content, always. Lorem ipsum designs collapse the moment actual words arrive — headlines run long, sections turn out unnecessary, and the layout was tested against nothing. Because we write the copy as part of the same engagement, layouts are composed with your actual message from the first draft. It is slower at the start and much faster overall.

Whichever one your situation argues for — the honest answer is that the platform is a consequence of how the site will be run, not a house default. Teams that edit and publish regularly usually get WordPress, built clean with a custom theme. Storefronts get Shopify or WooCommerce depending on the catalogue and operations. Sites that change rarely are often best hand-built and static: fastest, most stable, nothing to maintain. We explain the trade-offs in plain English and you make the call with us.

Completely. Domain, hosting account, code, content, images, analytics — registered to you, handed over at launch. If we disappeared tomorrow you would lose a supplier, not your website. We think anything else is a hostage arrangement dressed up as a service, and we do not do it.

Usually yes. We will review what you have — some hosting is genuinely too slow or restrictive for a modern build, and if so we will show you the numbers and recommend a move, typically a modest cost. Your domain never needs to move; it just points at the new site when we launch, which is a few minutes of change, planned so there is no downtime.

Nothing. Everything already belongs to you and runs without us. Any developer can pick up the code — it is standard, documented, and free of proprietary lock-ins. That is deliberate: we would rather be kept because the work is good than because leaving is painful.

Yes, and we would rather you let us. Words and layout are the same argument: a headline that runs two lines changes the design, and a photo with the subject on the right decides where the text goes. We interview you for the facts, write to your buyer, and art-direct imagery — including reworking your existing phone photos to web standard, which is more often possible than people expect. There is a whole service page on this: Copy & Images.

The build gives ranking its best foundation: clean structure, fast pages, semantic markup, schema, descriptive metadata, and copy that actually answers what buyers search. What no honest studio will promise is a position — rankings also depend on your market, your competitors and your authority over time. If search is a primary goal, the SEO & SEM service continues where the build leaves off; if a rebuild is replacing an existing site, we map and redirect everything that already earns traffic so rankings are protected rather than reset.

Fast enough that speed stops being a topic. We build against Core Web Vitals as a design constraint — light pages, optimised images with explicit dimensions, no layout shift, no plugin bloat — and we test on real devices, not just a desktop simulator. Speed is mostly the result of restraint: shipping only what the page needs. That restraint is a design decision, which is why it is part of the design service and not an optimisation bill afterwards.

Accessible structure is our default, not an upgrade: semantic headings, keyboard navigation, visible focus, alt text that describes, contrast that passes, and animation that respects reduced-motion settings. Beyond being right, it overlaps almost perfectly with what search engines and answer engines reward — and it widens the set of customers who can actually use your site. If your industry has formal compliance requirements, tell us on the first call and we will scope to them explicitly.

If you want to, yes — that preference shapes the platform choice at the start. Editable builds come with a walkthrough and a site your team can genuinely run: text, images, pages, products, without a developer on call. And if you never want to touch an admin screen, we offer the opposite arrangement instead: managed updates, where you email us the change and it is generally live within one business day. Most clients land somewhere in between.

It depends on the platform. A static hand-built site needs almost nothing: hosting renewals and occasional content updates. A WordPress or commerce site needs regular core and plugin updates, backups and monitoring — routine when done on schedule, expensive when ignored for a year. We offer a light monthly care arrangement for exactly that, or we hand you a plain-English checklist and you run it yourself. Both are legitimate; what is not legitimate is nobody doing it.

A fixed quote against an agreed scope — never an hourly meter. The price moves with how many pages need genuinely custom design and what has to be produced for them (copy, photography, illustration), which is why we scope first and quote second. The quote then holds. As honest context: a designed business site is a four-figure project, not a few hundred dollars — and the difference between it and a template is usually visible in the first month of enquiries.