happydigital

Services / Website development

Website development

Websites that load before your visitor blinks.

Fast, modern website development that tells your story clearly and stays easy to change. We build the kind of site that earns a second click — and the kind your marketing team can actually update without filing a ticket.

Proof this website. Static, self-hosted fonts, no third-party scripts on the critical path — built and hosted on Webtold, which is also ours.

  • 2020founded · New York, working globally
  • 47products shipped
  • 10+in-house team, one team end to end
Scope of work

What website development covers here

From a five-page site that has to convert, to a rebuild of something that grew unmaintainable.

Marketing & brochure sites

The site that has to explain what you do and get someone to write to you. Clear, fast, and built so the copy can change without a developer.

Content & publishing

Blogs, resource libraries, documentation — structured so search engines can read them and your team can add to them.

Performance work

Real speed engineering, not a caching plugin: less JavaScript, right-sized images, self-hosted fonts, no third-party chains on the critical path.

Rebuilds & rescues

A site that has accumulated ten years of plugins and nobody dares touch. We rebuild it on something maintainable and carry the URLs across.

Forms that reach you

Enquiry forms with real spam protection and real delivery, because a contact form that silently drops messages is worse than no form.

Accessibility & standards

Keyboard parity, sensible contrast, semantic markup. Built in from the start, where it is nearly free, rather than retrofitted later.

Built onAstro · React · WordPress · WooCommerce · PHP · Node.js

Honest fit

Is a new site the right spend?

When a rebuild pays

Your site is slow, hard to edit, or says something you stopped believing two years ago. Or it converts badly and nobody can tell you why. Those are fixable, and the payback is measurable in enquiries.

When the site is not the problem

If the site is fine and the real problem is that nobody visits it, a rebuild will not fix that — you need reach, not a new homepage. We will point you at the technical work that actually moves the number instead of selling you pages.

In practice

An engagement like this

A studio’s site takes nine seconds to load on a phone because of a page builder, four analytics tags and a slider nobody scrolls past. We rebuild it as a static site with the same content and a clearer structure. It now paints in under a second, the marketing lead edits copy without help, and every old URL still resolves.

How a project runs

Four steps, no theater

Same four steps whether it’s a website, a mobile app, or an integration. The scope changes; the process doesn’t.

  1. 01

    Listen

    NDA first, then plain-English discovery: your problem, your users, your numbers.

  2. 02

    Plan

    Research, a proposal you can repeat back to us, and an honest estimate.

  3. 03

    Build

    Agile cycles with working software you can click — not status decks.

  4. 04

    Ship

    Rigorous testing, launch, and a handover that survives a code review.

We’re a New York studio with a standing in-house team of 10+, working with clients globally. You’ll talk to the people who write the code.

Straight answers

Questions we hear a lot

How long does a website take, and what does it cost?

A focused marketing site is typically 3-6 weeks from kickoff, including content and a round of revisions. Fixed scope and a fixed price, agreed before we start — we do not publish a rate card because the honest number depends on how many pages, how much content and how much integration you actually need. You get that number in writing after one conversation, free.

What makes a website "fast", and does it matter?

It matters because visitors leave. Fast means the page paints in well under a second on a mid-range phone on mobile data — achieved by shipping less: static HTML where possible, no render-blocking third-party chains, self-hosted fonts, images sized for the slot they sit in. Most slow sites are slow because of what was added, not because of hosting.

Will we be able to edit it ourselves?

Yes. We fit the editing approach to who actually maintains it — a CMS when a marketing team publishes weekly, something simpler when the site changes twice a year. We would rather give you the smaller tool you will use than the elaborate one you will not.

WordPress or something else?

WordPress when the plugin ecosystem or an existing team is the deciding factor, and we have built a great many of them. A modern static build when speed and security matter more, which for a brochure or marketing site is usually the honest answer. You are reading a static one.

Do you do the design too, or do we bring one?

Either. We design and build in one team, or we build faithfully from a design you already have. What we will not do is quietly redraw someone else’s work halfway through — if we think a design has a problem, we say so before we start. See UI/UX design if the interface is the part you need most.

Start here

What is your site not doing?

Tell us the symptom — slow, hard to edit, not converting — and we’ll tell you what we’d change, and what it would cost.

Start a project