How I work

Roots & Reach is how I work.

Five steps. Each one ends with something you can hold, read or click. Roots is the part that stays with your business: the site on your domain, the measurement, the record of every enquiry. Reach is the part that brings people to it.

If you already have a website and a team, steps one, four and five are the whole method: the quick look, the plan, the numbers every month. Steps two and three happen only if the site is the problem.

Get in touch
A young oak tree drawn as a cutaway: deep roots spreading through the soil below, and branches reaching out to the right above.

The five steps

Roots first. Then reach.

The five things you get, side by side on a desk: a written page, a draft on a phone, the site on a laptop, a monthly plan and a one-page report.

  1. Look

    I read what you already have: your listing, your site, your analytics and your advertising accounts if you have them, and the competitors you actually lose work to.

    You get: a quick look, free: the few things that matter most, with the numbers behind them.

  2. Draft

    If a website is the answer, you see a draft homepage on a private link, built from what you already publish, with any generated picture labelled as generated. You judge it on your phone, not from a proposal.

    You get: a private draft, yours to keep or bin.

  3. Build

    The whole site, on the platform this one runs on, with a place for every enquiry to land. Then it goes live on your domain.

    You get: a live site on your domain, hosted by me.

  4. Bring people

    Search, advertising, or both, run month to month against a written plan you have agreed.

    You get: a written plan, agreed before the month starts.

  5. Check

    Every month, one page: what came in, where it came from, what it cost, and what changes next.

    You get: the monthly page, and a reason to keep going or stop.

What is underneath

Three things you never have to think about, because I do.

  • Method

    A test every page must pass

    Before anything ships I ask six questions of it: who it is for, what it must do, whether they will understand it, whether every claim can be checked, whether it persuades honestly, and what happens after it works.

  • Design

    A foundation, not a template

    My design work sits on a written foundation whose first rule is that clarity is the first courtesy. It is why this site has no carousel and nothing that moves without a reason, and why the one box that does appear, asking about detailed analytics, puts Reject and Accept side by side at the same size.

  • Platform

    The same one this site runs on

    New sites I build run on one small, fast platform with the enquiry record and the measurement built in. I run it for you. Where a business already runs on WordPress, I build and look after that too.

This site

This site was built the same way.

This site was built with the method above, on the same platform as the sites I build, and skinned from my own mockup so I could choose by seeing it rather than reading about it. How it was built will be written up in Resources.

Go to Resources 

What the five steps looked like here

  1. Look: everything ever decided about the company and its site, read and listed, before a word was written.
  2. Draft: this, on a private link, in the look I chose by seeing it.
  3. Build: the pages you are reading, with the enquiry form wired into the private area behind them.
  4. Bring people: open to search engines from the day it went live.
  5. Check: one page of numbers a month, from the month the site went live.

Start at step one.

Send a link to your listing or your site. Step one is a quick look, and it costs you nothing but the message.

Get in touch