Hand-coded web design & development
No AI, WordPress, or page builders
At Websites For The People, we build websites differently than many other web developers. We specialize in static websites coded by hand because we know this approach gets the best results for our clients. All of our websites load extremely fast because they have only the code they need and nothing more. This gives our websites a competitive edge in Google search rankings and reduces security risks, so you can count on your website working for you without needing to continually pay attention to it.
What is a static website?
A static website is a website that is fully assembled before anyone goes to the website. By contrast, a dynamic website is generated on the fly every time someone goes to the website. Generating a dynamic website takes time, slowing down the website, and introduces opportunities for security vulnerabilities. A dynamic website allows everyone using the website to see something different, for example, if they need to log into an account and edit their own profile. WordPress and drag-and-drop page builders like Squarespace and Wix are dynamic websites. Dynamic websites have their place, but they are much more difficult and expensive to make fast, secure, and reliable than static websites.
Why choose a static website?
More conversions
Your website's role isn't just to look pretty, but to bring in business. A successful website leads users to take an action, whether that's scheduling an appointment, requesting a quote, or making an order. In other words, your website should convert users into clients or customers.
In order for a website to convert, it needs to be easy for people to take the action you want them to take. The longer a website takes to load, the fewer people will bother waiting for it. If your website is slow, it doesn't matter how it looks or how clever your pitch is; people already left before they saw it.
Static websites load extremely fast, often in under one second. This gives everyone coming to the website a chance to engage with it, leading to more conversions.
Higher search rankings
Google wants to direct people to what they are searching for. They know people are impatient and many won't bother waiting on a slow website. That is why Google ranks fast websites higher in search results. All of our websites pass Google's Core Web Vitals tests and score ≥90 out of 100 on Google Page Speed metrics, which is difficult to achieve for many dynamic websites.
Rock solid security and reliability
Static websites have much less room to go wrong than dynamic websites because they use the simplest technology that does the job. Once your website is online, you can forget about it and don't have to worry about surprise maintenance bills to protect your investment.
Every website runs on a server, which is just a computer that is always on, ready to send someone a web page. For static websites, the server's job is as simple as possible: just send files over the Internet. For dynamic websites, the server has much more work to do. For example, a dynamic website's server could get the text of a blog post from a database, check if the user is logged in, then get the user's name from the database before assembling the web page files to send over the Internet.
The complexity required for a dynamic website introduces room for security vulnerabilities and room for the website to break. All the code running on a dynamic website needs to be kept up to date regularly to minimize these risks. These are a frequent cause of hassles and unexpected bills for dynamic WordPress websites, where updating WordPress' core code can break a plugin, or the new version of a plugin might interfere with a different plugin. Even with regular maintenance, the website can still get hacked and taken over by spammers. These risks are very low for static websites because there is almost nothing to hack.
Why code websites by hand?
There are endless technologies that promise to make it easy for anyone to build a website without needing to know how to code: WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, Google Sites, Claude, and ChatGPT, to name just a few. While all of these can make a website, there is a big difference between making a website and making a website that helps your business.
All of these tools add huge piles of code to your website just to make it function at all. When it works, that extra code slows down your website, frustrating your potential clients/customers and leading many of them to leave. When the website does not work, that extra code makes it much more difficult to figure out what is going wrong and requires expensive developer time to fix. Over a decade of coding experience has taught us that code is a lot like writing: the less you need to get your point across, the better.
That is why we use a simple static site generator tool, specifically Eleventy, to build our websites. Eleventy saves us from copying and pasting the same header and footer code on each page, but that's about all it does. Unlike complex dynamic websites, Eleventy does not add any code to our websites other than the code we write.
By writing our websites' code by hand, we build the shortest possible path for your website users to become your clients/customers.