Glasgow Shipyard believes you should have a website that is usable to both you and the people viewing it.

We do this by building websites that work.

There is an industry standard out there. It revolves around expensive design companies with a 90’s understanding of how the internet works producing Photoshop “mockups”, developers using bootstrap templates, and marketers with their tripwires, artificial scarcity, business masterminds and market penetration. It’s also largely total bullshit.

The industry standard is an effective way of saying the worst of the homogenous web. Characterless and bloated (but probably very pretty), with minutes of work poured into customising some template for a site design that looks like every other one, resulting in your business being treated in exactly the same manner: pointless.

Glasgow Shipyard looks at things a wee bit differently. Here are our rules:

Understand Your Purpose and Your People

A site must convey your purpose and know who it’s talking to before anything else happens.

Content First

A site must have a clear voice and sustainable communication strategy.

Functionality Beats Fancy

A site must work before it has nifty transitions and parallax scrolling of giant images.

Responsibly Responsive

A site must be usable on any size of device, from smallest to largest.

Lightweight AF

A site must have the fewest lines of code possible, allowing fast loading wherever you are in the world.

Haun Built Fae Scratch

A site design must be as close to hand built from scratch* as is reasonable. Adapting templates and frameworks is an excellent way to part you from cash while someone else worked harder for longer for less. That’s not cool.

Gies A Shout

*this obviously does not mean reinventing the wheel, because that would be daft.