Why I started Splinx Studio

I started Splinx Studio after watching a client stare at their brand new website and ask a question I couldn't answer well: "So what happens now?"

The site looked good. Everyone had agreed it looked good. It had a slideshow on the homepage, a page for every department, and an animation on the hero section that took about four seconds to finish playing. It had also taken three months and a significant amount of their money, and three weeks after launch it had produced exactly two enquiries, one of which was spam.

Nothing about it was broken. That was the part that stayed with me. Every individual decision had been defensible, and the result was still useless.

The thing nobody was measuring

When I went back through that project, the pattern was easy to see. Every conversation had been about how things looked. Which shade of blue, which font, whether the logo should sit left or centre. Not one meeting had been about what a visitor was supposed to do when they arrived, or how quickly they could do it.

So the site had been optimised, very carefully, for the six people who saw it in review meetings. It had never been optimised for the person on a phone, on a slow connection, trying to find out whether this company handled their kind of job and how to reach them.

A website is not a brochure. It is the part of your business that works while you sleep, and most of them are asleep too.

That was the gap I wanted to build a studio around. Not better looking websites, there are plenty of those. Websites where somebody had actually asked what the thing was for.

What changed in how we work

The practical effect is that our first conversation with a client is almost never about design. It's about the business. Who buys from you, what they're worried about before they buy, what they usually ask on the phone, what a good week of enquiries looks like, and what it's currently costing you when the site doesn't do its job.

Those answers decide almost everything that follows. If your customers compare three suppliers before calling, your site needs proof and specifics near the top. If they're already sold and just need to book, everything else should get out of the way. Those are different websites, and they don't get to the same place by picking a nicer template.

It also changed what we consider finished. A build isn't done when it looks like the design file. It's done when it loads fast on a mid range phone, when the forms actually deliver, when the headings make sense to a search engine, and when the client can find what they need without calling us.

Three things we decided not to do

We don't sell effects. Motion is worth using where it helps someone understand what just happened. When a visitor consciously notices an animation, it has usually already cost more than it earned. We keep it quiet and we keep it fast.

We don't hand over a black box. When a project ends, the code, the design files and the accounts belong to the client. If they want to take it to another developer next year, that should be an easy afternoon, not a hostage negotiation. Building something deliberately hard to leave is a business model, and it isn't ours.

We don't disappear at launch. The weeks after go live are when the real problems surface, and the client is usually least equipped to deal with them alone. We stay reachable.

Where the studio is going

We started with websites, and websites are still most of what we do. But the work has been steadily pulling us further in. A school that needed its admissions and fees in one system. A hospital that needed patients, doctors and administrators each looking at a different version of the same schedule. A shop owner who needed to stop running inventory out of a notebook.

None of those started as software projects. They started as businesses that had outgrown their spreadsheets. That's why we now build mobile apps, SaaS platforms and custom internal software alongside the websites, because the question is the same one every time. What is this for, and who has to use it on a bad day?

If you're reading this because you're deciding whether to work with us, here's the honest summary. We're not the cheapest option and we're not the flashiest. What we'll give you is a straight answer about what your project needs, a fixed price before we start, and something that still works properly a year after we've handed it over.

That's the whole idea. Thanks for reading.