Who owns your website?

Three ways of renting your own website

• Renting. A purchased theme, plugins on annual licence, features leased. You pay for a right of use, and the feature stops the day the payment stops.
• Captive hosting. The site runs on an account in the supplier’s name. Leaving means a migration you have to negotiate, usually at the worst possible moment.
• Unreadable code. The quietest of the three. The code is yours on paper, and its author remains the only one able to pick it up. The dependency becomes technical.

What “bespoke” means

“Bespoke” means a direct line between what you want and what the site does: the update calendar stays yours, whatever a third-party vendor decides. And a bespoke site can stay simple, quick to deliver and affordable.

It also means that code written cleanly can be read, taken over and put to work by somebody else, including by software agents you direct yourself.

This takes ten seconds to check: look at whose name is on the repository.

The questions to ask before signing

• Will the code repository be in my name, from the first day?
• Who holds the domain name, the hosting account, the certificates?
• What must I keep paying every year for the site to remain in working order?
• If I leave tomorrow, what leaves with me, and what stays with you?

An awkward answer to the last question is worth any audit.

What builds up in the repository

Every delivery leaves something in the repository: the code, the history of decisions, the documentation, the checks. All of it stays yours.

Why we work this way

We deliver into your repository, in your name, from the outset. You are free to leave, and that is exactly what obliges us to earn our place.