Business Systems
When a website needs to do something: member portals, event boards, job registers and custom tools.
Not every website is a brochure. Some need to actually do something: log people in, take registrations, manage listings, run an application process, hold data that matters.
That’s a different discipline from marketing site work. Different priorities, different risks, different way of scoping and pricing. We do both, and we deliberately keep them apart.
What we’ve built
Member portals
Gated content and account areas for associations, clubs and membership organisations. Renewals, member directories, documents released by membership tier.
Event boards
Listing, registration and RSVP systems for organisations running a regular calendar, including capacity limits, waitlists and attendee exports.
Job registers
Listing and application systems for industry bodies and member organisations, with employer submission flows and moderation before anything goes public.
Booking and enquiry flows
Multi-step logic that reflects how a business actually operates, where a single contact form genuinely isn’t enough. Routing, conditional questions, integration with the systems already in use.
Why we keep this separate from your marketing site
A public marketing site and a logged-in application are optimised for opposite things.
The marketing site needs to be as light and fast as possible, publicly crawlable, and structured so search engines understand every page. The application needs authentication, session state, database queries and business logic, none of which any search engine should ever see, all of which add weight.
Bolt one onto the other and you get a compromise: a slower marketing site carrying code it never uses, and an application constrained by decisions made for SEO reasons. We keep them as separate systems sharing a domain and a design language, so each is built for its actual job.
That decision is why this site loads as fast as it does, incidentally, and why this page is a description of that work rather than a live demonstration of it.
How we scope it
Custom builds go wrong when they’re quoted from a paragraph. We start with a paid discovery phase producing an actual specification: what it does, what it explicitly doesn’t do, how it handles the edge cases, and what it costs. You own that document regardless of whether you build with us.
It’s the least exciting way to start and it’s the reason our custom projects tend to land near their estimate.
Who this is for
Organisations who have outgrown spreadsheets and email for a process that matters, or who are paying per-seat for software that only does two thirds of what they need.
Common questions
Is this a website or software?
Software, delivered through a browser and connected to your website. The distinction matters mostly for how it's scoped, built and priced, all of which work differently from a brochure site.
Could we not just use an off-the-shelf product?
Often yes, and we'll say so. Custom is worth it when the off-the-shelf options force you to change how your business works, or when the per-seat licensing over a few years costs more than building it once.
What happens if we outgrow it?
We build on standard, widely-used technology rather than anything proprietary, so another developer can pick it up. You should never be locked in by the shape of your own system.
Go deeper
Worth reading on this
How to build a solid site structure for SEO
Site architecture is decided early and expensive to change later. How to plan hierarchy, URLs, internal linking and topic clusters so your content has somewhere sensible to live.
Website speed is an SEO problem, not just a UX one
Site speed affects rankings directly, and affects them again indirectly through visitor behaviour. Here's how the two connect.
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