Clear websites, built by someone who explains things for a living

A website is a teaching problem

Most bad websites are not badly designed. They're badly explained. Somebody who knows their own business inside out has written about it for a stranger who knows nothing, and lost them in the first ten seconds — because when you understand something deeply it becomes very hard to remember what it's like not to.

I've spent twenty years doing exactly one thing about that problem. Standing in front of a room of people who don't yet understand something, working out precisely where the understanding breaks, and rebuilding the explanation until it lands. That's the job. A website is the same job with a smaller audience and no chance to ask a follow-up question.

What Tafuma Web Services does

Clear websites for small businesses. Fixed scopes, visible pricing, nothing agreed without being written down first, and no launch without your approval. The full detail — process, previous work, terms — lives on the studio site.

Final pricing and scope are confirmed in writing before any work starts. Domains, business email and specialist work are priced separately rather than buried in a bundle.

Why the person building it matters

You can buy a website from a great many people. Three things about who's building yours are worth knowing, and they're the reason this page exists on my personal site rather than only on the studio's.

I explain things for a living. Twenty years teaching physics and maths across two education systems, in two languages. The single most common failure in small business websites is that the visitor can't tell what's being offered. That's the exact failure I've spent my career fixing.

I'm calm when things go wrong. I work as a registered mental health nurse on a psychiatric intensive care unit. A deadline slipping or a client changing their mind late is not, by my standards, a stressful event. You will not get defensive emails from me.

I run my own businesses on these tools. Not theoretically. Everything I build for other people, I've already broken and fixed on my own sites first.

And one thing that isn't on the studio site: I came to this country in 2004 and started again from the bottom. I have a specific sympathy for people building something small from nothing, which is most of the clients I want.

What "built to earn trust" actually means

It's the studio's line and it isn't decoration. A small business website has one job before any other: convince a stranger that you are real, competent, and going to answer the phone. Everything else — the design, the animations, the clever copy — is downstream of that.

So the work is mostly unglamorous. Saying plainly what you do. Making it obvious who it's for. Making the next step unmissable. Loading quickly on a phone on a bad connection, because that's where most of your visitors actually are.

What I don't do

• Guess at the price. Scope is agreed in writing first, so you know what it costs before anyone starts.
• Hold your site hostage. It's yours. Domain and hosting in your name, not mine.
• Promise you'll rank first on Google. Nobody can, and anyone who does is either lying or about to do something to your site you'll regret.
• Take work I can't do properly. Complex applications, e-commerce at scale and bespoke software are somebody else's specialism. I'll say so and point you at them.

Getting started

The studio site has an enquiry form and a "plan your website" page that walks through what's needed. Replies usually come within two working days, from me rather than from an account manager, because there isn't one.