Stories

Notes from behind the shopfront.

Thoughts on small-business websites, AI search, and what we've learned after building 1,500 sites. Updated every month or so.

A shopfront with a phone held up showing the website version of the same shop

Featured

April 2026 · 6 min read

Why your shopfront needs a website in 2026

Search used to send a human to your door. Now it sends an AI assistant to read your website first. If your site can't answer the AI's questions, the customer never hears about you. Here's what changed and what to do about it.

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3 more stories

A cluttered workspace with an unfinished DIY website

April 2026 · 5 min

The real cost of a DIY website

$40/month for Squarespace seems cheap. Do the five-year maths, and count the Saturdays lost to building it.

March 2026 · 7 min

Meet a Newcastle high street business

What happens when a Newcastle shopfront trades a hand-built WordPress site for a structured, AI-search-ready Flare Site. Patterns, not names.

A week's worth of work on a calendar with notes and a laptop

March 2026 · 8 min

How we build websites in a week (without cutting corners)

The actual day-by-day. What AI does, what humans do, and where the quality really comes from.

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