Agency vs freelancer vs in-house: an honest cost and risk comparison
Agency, freelancer or in-house for digital work: fully loaded employment costs, key-person risk, hybrid models, and a scoring worksheet for your situation.
Insights
Things worth knowing before you spend the budget
We write the guides we wish prospective clients had read before briefing us. Several of them explain how to avoid needing an agency at all.
4 articles
Web design & development
Building, rebuilding and speeding up the sites your buyers judge you by.
Core Web Vitals 2026: how to actually pass INP, LCP and CLS
How to pass Core Web Vitals in 2026: reading field data properly, finding the real LCP element, fixing INP by yielding the main thread, and taming CLS.
Shopify vs WooCommerce vs headless: choosing by constraint, not hype
Shopify, WooCommerce or headless commerce? A working comparison of cost of ownership, performance, lock-in and the constraints that usually decide it.
Web application development cost: what actually moves the number
Web application development cost without a price list: the five real drivers, how pricing models shift risk, and how to read quotes that differ tenfold.
Website redesign without losing SEO: protecting the traffic you have
How to redesign a website without losing rankings: the baseline audit, the URL map, redirect rules, staging hygiene and the launch-day runbook.
3 articles
Mobile & app stores
Choosing a stack, shipping to the stores, and being found once you are there.
App Store Optimization in 2026: what actually moves installs
How ASO really works: how each store ranks, what belongs in Apple and Google metadata, which creatives to test, and the signals that decide visibility.
Flutter vs React Native vs native: a decision framework for 2026
Flutter, React Native or native? How each renders, where the performance claims hold up, what cross-platform really saves, and when only native will do.
The mobile app launch checklist: from store listing to day-30 retention
A mobile app launch checklist that starts before submission: beta cohorts, store assets, launch sequencing, activation, lifecycle messaging and retention.
2 articles
Design, brand & accessibility
Systems that keep a brand coherent, and the standards that keep it usable.
Brand guidelines vs design system: what to build, and when
Brand guidelines and design systems answer different questions. What belongs in each, the maintenance cost nobody quotes for, and how to tell which you need.
WCAG 2.2 AA compliance and the European Accessibility Act: what sites must do
What WCAG 2.2 AA and the European Accessibility Act require of a business website: who is in scope, what changed in 2.2, how to test it, and how to remediate.
3 articles
Search & organic
Earning visibility in classical search and in the answer engines that now sit on top of it.
Generative engine optimization: how to get cited by AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity
What actually earns a citation in AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity — what Google says explicitly, where the industry disagrees, and what to do about it.
Google Business Profile optimisation: the local SEO checklist that matters
How local ranking actually works, field by field: categories, service areas, NAP consistency, photos, reviews, local pages, and how to measure the map pack.
Topical authority: how pillar-and-cluster content architecture actually works
How to build topical authority with pillar and cluster content: choosing clusters, mapping intent to URLs, internal linking, cadence, and honest measurement.
3 articles
Paid, social & measurement
Spending money deliberately, and being able to prove what it did.
B2B LinkedIn strategy without ad spend: the organic system that works
An organic LinkedIn system for B2B: defining an ICP, content pillars, formats that earn reach, employee advocacy that works, and measuring pipeline not likes.
Google Consent Mode v2 and server-side tagging: what actually changes
How Consent Mode v2 and server-side tagging change the conversion data your ad platforms optimise on: firing order, modelling thresholds and a safe rollout.
The 12-point Google Ads audit checklist that finds wasted spend
A 12-point Google Ads audit covering conversion tracking, search terms, negatives, bidding, geography, Performance Max, creative and budget pacing.
2 articles
Data & AI
What the technology can actually do for a business this size, and what it cannot.
AI use cases for business: seven that pay back, and how to size one first
Seven AI and machine learning use cases where the payback is checkable, the six numbers to write down before funding one, and a build-buy-or-fine-tune rule.
Data readiness for AI: the checklist to run before you fund a project
The data readiness checklist to run before funding an AI project: volume, coverage, label quality, lineage, lawful basis, pipelines and the baseline to beat.
3 articles
Choosing a partner
How to evaluate an agency — including the questions that make us uncomfortable.
Agency vs freelancer vs in-house: an honest cost and risk comparison
Agency, freelancer or in-house for digital work: fully loaded employment costs, key-person risk, hybrid models, and a scoring worksheet for your situation.
Twenty questions to ask a web development agency before you sign anything
Twenty questions that reveal how a web development agency actually works: team, process, code ownership, performance, results and support after launch.
SEO agency red flags: how to tell a strategy from a sales script
The guarantees, reporting, contract terms and link tactics that should end an SEO pitch early — and what a credible proposal looks like instead.
Insights
Have a question none of these answer?
Send it over. If it is a good question we will probably write it up — and you will get the answer either way.