A site that reads as clearly to a crawler as it does to a customer — and converts both.

The build gates are the product

Every site we deliver passes a fixed set of gates. Not as targets — as pass/fail criteria that block shipping.

The machine reader test. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot do not execute JavaScript.¹We run a server-side render check in CI: the raw HTML response that crawlers receive must contain the same H1, main copy, and JSON-LD as the rendered browser version. If it doesn’t, the site doesn’t ship.

Core Web Vitals at field truth. Lighthouse scores tell you about lab conditions. Real users — on real South African mobile connections — are measured differently. We target CrUX p75 mobile: LCP ≤ 2.5s, INP ≤ 200ms, CLS ≤ 0.1. INP replaced FID as the interaction metric in March 2024. Any performance specification still referencing FID is out of date.

Accessibility as a gate, not a score. WCAG 2.2 AA became a W3C Recommendation in October 2023. The European Accessibility Act enforces it across EU consumer-facing services from 28 June 2025 — SA businesses serving EU customers are exposed to fines up to €1 million (Spain) and criminal liability (Ireland).²We run Pa11y CI as the final gate before deployment. Touch targets are a minimum of 24×24 CSS px. Every build ships with a working skip-link and visible keyboard focus rings.

POPIA from day one. Not retrofitted after launch. Legal templates (Terms, Privacy, POPIA-specific notice) are built in from the start, not bolted on when a client asks.

What we refuse to ship

Certain patterns are banned outright, not discouraged. These are the ones NN/g, Baymard, and WCAG have studied at scale:

• No auto-rotating carousels. In Notre Dame’s measurement, roughly 1% of visitors clicked a homepage carousel at all — and 84% of those clicks went to slide 1.³ Nielsen Norman Group’s testing showed users missing even a prominent discount because the carousel rotated it away, and Baymard’s mobile testing found auto-rotation sending participants on “unintended detours.” Manual prev/next navigation for content galleries where the user actively chooses to browse is allowed. Auto-rotation is not.
• No dark patterns. Zero of the 16 Brignull dark patterns. EU DSA Article 25 (in force February 2024), FTC Section 5 enforcement (including the USD 140 million Grubhub judgment of December 2024⁴), and POPIA §69 all catch the catalogue. The three categories we treat as automatic disqualifiers: Cialdini-corrupting patterns (confirmshaming, fake scarcity), regulatory-liability patterns (hidden costs, hidden subscriptions, roach motel), and patterns that corrupt what the business is trying to say.
• No AI-generated trust imagery. Detection accuracy for AI-generated faces now exceeds 90% among non-experts and is rising. One identified image collapses the trust architecture the rest of the site is built to support. Real photography only for testimonials, founder portrait, and client representations. Where photography is not yet available, type and authentic assets carry the page.
• No FAQ schema. Google deprecated FAQ rich results on 7 May 2026.
• No generic CTA copy. “Submit”, “Click here”, “Get Started” without context, and “Learn more” as the only verb are banned. Every CTA carries an outcome: “Get my audit,” “Book my discovery call,” “Read the report.”

What the CTA says is part of the conversion architecture. “A link is a promise.” — Kara Pernice, Nielsen Norman Group, A Link is a Promise, 2014.⁵ We apply that to every button on every page we ship.

Build tiers

Prices are flat ZAR. AAA is not VAT-registered.

Quick Fix R3 000–R5 000: GBP setup + critical fixes only, 1–3 days. For sites that are structurally sound but missing the signals.

AI Visibility Module +R5 000: added to any tier. Includes the SSR pass test, a 20-prompt × 4-engine AI citation baseline, and three months of tracking via the AIV instrument. This is the bridge into the AI Visibility Tracking retainer — knowing where you start makes every subsequent month’s data meaningful.

The Complex tier is the most common starting point for SA SMBs with real transactional needs and an existing customer base. Premium Build is for founder-led professional firms where the site is the brand.

The repo is yours from day one

Every Premium and Complex build ships with the client owning the repository and holding all credentials. No platform lock-in, no ongoing fee for access to your own site, no dependence on us to keep the infrastructure running after handover.

Start with a call

Premium Build clients — especially greenfield projects where the site is the brand — have nothing to audit yet. The discovery call is where scope, timeline, and the right tier get established. For visitors who are still scoping, the free audit tells you what the current site needs before any build decision is made.