(1.0)
Rules, not vibes
The stack is chosen by a scoring engine we wrote down, not by a chatbot improvising. The same answers always produce the same recommendation, and we can show you the working.
Build Spec
WordPress, Shopify or something custom?
Find out what you should actually build. Five screens, ninety seconds, no email.
No sales call, no jargon, no thirty-page PDF nobody reads. At the end you get the stack we would put you on, the reasoning behind it, and an honest list of what you can leave out.
The recommendation comes from our own rules, written down and applied the same way every time. A language model writes the explanation around it. It never gets to choose the answer.
- Free, with no email wall
- Your site scored live
- Built in Nantwich
It chooses between these five.
WordPress
WooCommerce
Shopify
Next.js + Sanity
Custom platform
Watch it decide
No black box. You see it change its mind.
This is the real scoring engine, running live on this page. As requirements land, the ranking moves. One login is enough to turn a website into software on a custom platform.
Try it on your businessA hospitality venue, dated site, one non-technical manager. Requirements landing in real time.
Why this beats an hour with someone who only sells one platform.
(2.0)
It tells you what to skip
Every requirement you tap gets sorted into build-this, worth-having and leave-it. The third column is the one most agencies would rather you never saw.
(3.0)
Your site, actually measured
Hand over your address and we run a live Google Lighthouse audit while you carry on tapping. Performance, accessibility and SEO — measured, not guessed at.
(4.0)
Ninety seconds, not a meeting
Five screens, twelve taps, one optional field. You can do it on your phone in a queue and still come out with something worth acting on.
(5.0)
No email wall
The whole result is on screen for nothing. We only ask for an address if you want the full phased plan as a PDF, and by then you will know whether it is worth it.
(6.0)
Written for your business
A venue has covers and no-shows. An agency has viewings and vendors. The write-up uses your vocabulary, because advice that would suit anyone helps nobody.
Showing the working
What actually decides your stack.
Every answer you tap adds or subtracts points across the five stacks. Most of them nudge. Four of them shove. These are the ones that decide most builds, and the reasoning is not hidden — it is written down in the engine and it is the same for everyone.
- 01
Whether anybody signs in
The heaviest single input in the engine. Once people have accounts, roles and their own data on screen, you are not commissioning a website. You are commissioning software with a website attached. Membership plugins will get you to a demo and then quietly own you. This one answer, on its own, can move a project off WordPress entirely.
- 02
Who keeps it running after we have gone
Weighted harder than anything the site actually has to do, because it is the answer that ages worst. Headless rewards a marketing team or a developer nearby and punishes an empty chair, so “nobody, really” pushes the recommendation towards WordPress or Shopify and away from Next.js. “We have developers” pushes it the other way. For a business with nobody to run it, the boring stack is the correct one.
- 03
Whether the pricing has to think
Trade and retail on one catalogue. Customer-specific rates. Quantity breaks that change by product group. Shopify will decline some of that, politely and permanently. It is the clearest fork in any eCommerce build, and it is the reason WooCommerce still wins projects Shopify would otherwise take.
- 04
Whether there is a real date
A hard deadline pulls the answer towards Shopify and pushes it away from a custom platform, because custom takes the time it takes. We would rather tell you that on a landing page than in week nine.
If you think one of those is wrong, say so. The rules encode our opinions, and opinions get sharper when someone argues with them. And if the honest answer is that the brand needs sorting before the website does, that is a different job: start with branding.
What it chooses between
Five stacks. And when each one is the wrong answer.
These are the positions the engine actually holds. Open any of them for the full argument — including the cases where we would talk you out of it.
At a glance
The five stacks, side by side.
The one-line version. The full argument for each one, including where we would talk you out of it, is in the panels above.
| Stack | Best when | Wrong when | Typical timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress, fully custom | Content leads the site — a blog, guides, case studies, anything published regularly. | Real logic lives behind a login. Membership plugins will get you there and then quietly own you. | 10–12 weeks, typically |
| WooCommerce | Trade and retail pricing on a single catalogue, or rules Shopify simply refuses. | High order volume with nobody to maintain it — you will be running a shop and a server. | 12–14 weeks, depending on catalogue complexity |
| Shopify | Real order volume and a small team, or no technical team at all. | Your pricing needs to think — complex trade rules, per-customer catalogues, unusual VAT. | 8–10 weeks, often the fastest route to live |
| Next.js + Sanity | Brand and performance lead everything, and the site is a statement rather than a brochure. | Nobody is going to maintain it. Headless rewards a team and punishes neglect. | 12–14 weeks |
| A custom platform | People sign in and see their own data — clients, members, tenants, investors, staff. | There is a hard date six weeks out. Custom takes the time it takes and we would rather say so now. | 12–16 weeks for a first release, then it grows |
Four of these five are a website build. That is the work we do on the websites side. The fifth is a different kind of project: a custom platform, scoped and built the way we build software.
What we ask
Five questions. Not one of them is “what’s your budget”.
- 01
What are you, then?
Pick the closest. We're not precious about it.
10 seconds - 02
What have you got now?
Then tell us who you are — none of it is required, all of it makes the answer sharper.
20 seconds - 03
What does it need to actually do?
Tap everything that applies. This is the screen that decides your stack — watch the panel move.
40 seconds - 04
Who runs it once we've gone?
The honest answer. This moves the recommendation more than anything else here.
10 seconds - 05
What does winning look like?
Pick up to three. This shapes how we write it up, not what we build it on.
10 seconds
Budget and timeline come up when you decide you want a conversation, not before. The recommendation is the same either way, and it is the same whether you are down the road from us in Cheshire or three hundred miles away.
Questions
The ones people actually ask.
If yours is not here, ask us directly — we answer these ourselves.
The tool
Yes. The recommendation, the requirements breakdown and your site score are all on screen with nothing asked in return. If you want the full phased plan as a PDF, that is when we ask for an email — and by then you will already have seen enough to decide whether it is worth giving us.
No, and the difference matters. The stack is chosen by our own scoring rules — written down, applied identically every time, reviewable. The same answers always produce the same recommendation. A language model writes the explanation around that decision; it never gets to make it.
It recommends from the five stacks we build on, so yes, in that sense. But it will happily tell you Shopify is the right answer and that you do not need us to set it up. It also has an entire column dedicated to talking you out of things you asked for.
Because any number we put on a screen before understanding your content, your integrations and your deadline would be a guess dressed up as a quote. Our typical ranges are published on our services pages. A realistic figure for your project is a fifteen-minute conversation.
We run a live Google Lighthouse audit on it — the same tool you can run yourself in Chrome — and show you the performance, accessibility and SEO scores. It is optional, and we do not crawl beyond the page you give us.
Tell us. The rules encode our opinions, and opinions get sharper when someone argues with them. If your situation breaks the logic, that is genuinely useful and we would rather hear it than not.
You get your spec, and one follow-up from Ryan. The marketing tick box is unticked by default and leaving it that way costs you nothing.
Choosing a platform
If you are selling volume and nobody on your team wants to think about PCI compliance or a database at midnight, Shopify. If the shop is one part of a larger content site, or your pricing has rules Shopify will not entertain, WordPress with WooCommerce. The tool asks the four questions that actually separate the two, which is faster than reading a comparison table and guessing which paragraph is about you. We publish the head-to-head comparisons too, in our compare centre.
For most UK businesses it is still WordPress, built properly — meaning a theme written from scratch rather than a bought one held together by fourteen plugins. Headless, which for us means Next.js and Sanity, is faster and better structured, and it earns its keep when you publish often or run more than one market. If nobody is going to touch the site after launch, the cleverer answer is the wrong one.
When people sign in. The moment users have accounts, roles and their own data on screen, you are specifying software with a website attached. Booking engines, client portals, investor dashboards, tenant systems — all of them cross that line. It is the heaviest single input in our scoring, and it is the answer most agencies avoid giving early, because it changes the shape of the whole project.
Probably not on its own merits. You need one when you publish in volume, run more than one language or market, or want the same content feeding something other than the website — an app, a screen in a showroom, a partner feed. If none of those are true, headless adds machinery you will pay for and never use.
Yes. The tool is national and the recommendation neither knows nor cares where you are. We are in Nantwich and do a lot of work across Cheshire and the North West, but we build for clients across the UK and Europe, and the answer you get is the same either way.