About
One person, in Leeds, who answers the phone.
No account managers, no team page with stock photographs of people pointing at a laptop, and nothing quietly handed to a junior once the contract is signed. You deal with me because there is only me.
- Leeds
- Fixed prices
- No VAT
Photograph of Nick
A real one. Not stock, not an illustration, not the logo. 4:5, taken somewhere that looks like Leeds.
I am Nick Ward, and this is the whole company.
I design and build websites, apps and the content that keeps them alive, for small businesses in Leeds and across the UK. Everything on this site (the design, the code, the words, the performance numbers on the homepage) is mine. That is not a boast about capacity. It is the trade you are making: you get the person who does the work, and you give up the depth of bench an agency has.
Most of my clients have already met me before they get here. So the job of this page is not to introduce a stranger, it is to show you that the impression you formed in person holds up when you check.
PENDING: YOUR PARAGRAPH. Why you started this, in your own words. Three or four sentences, specific rather than inspirational. It is the part of the page nobody can write for you and the part most people will actually read.
The name
Why the N and the W are shouting.
People ask, and the answer is smaller than they expect.
oNWard. The N and the W are my initials (Nick Ward) sitting inside a word that already meant the thing I wanted the business to mean. I did not want a name that was my full name, because a business called Nick Ward Design tells you nothing about what it does or where it is going. I also did not want a name with no person in it, since the person is the entire proposition.
So the initials stay capitalised and everything else steps back. It is a small joke that rewards anyone who looks twice, which is roughly the standard I hold the rest of the work to.
Background
I came from engineering, not marketing.
Which changes what I think a website is for, and it changes what I think finished means.
My background is design engineering: CAD, product development, physical things that have to actually work. In that world a design is not finished when it looks right in a render. It is finished when it has been tested, and the test does not care how the drawing looked. Parts fail on the bench in front of you, publicly, and you go again.
That is a useful set of instincts to bring to websites, because the web has drifted the other way. A great deal of what gets sold as web design is a picture of a website: it looks superb in a mockup, it wins the sign-off meeting, and then it takes six seconds to load on a phone in a car park and nobody ever measures it. A mockup cannot fail. A build can, which is why I would rather be judged on the build.
So the standards here are the engineering ones. There is a performance budget the site has to come in under. There is an accessibility floor it has to clear. Both are measured, both are published on the homepage, and both apply to the concept work nobody is paying me for as much as they do to anything else.
How I work
Four rules I hold myself to.
Each one is checkable rather than aspirational. That is the only kind worth publishing.
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Say the price
Every figure this business charges is published on the pricing page. Not "from", not "get in touch for a quote", not a number that moves depending on how expensive your car looked. If you and I never speak, you can still find out what I cost.
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Say what is not included
Photography, brand identity, running your ads. There is a list of them on the pricing page. Almost every argument between a client and the person who built their website starts with something that was never discussed, so it gets discussed first.
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Hand over the keys
The domain, the code, the content and the analytics are in your name from the start. If you want to leave, you leave with everything and I hand over any login you do not already hold. Nothing here relies on you being unable to go elsewhere.
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Measure it, then publish the measurement
The performance numbers on the homepage are from a real audit of this real site, and they get re-run when the site changes. A web designer who will not show you their own Lighthouse score is telling you something.
The next step
Let's find out if I'm the right fit.
Twenty minutes on the phone. You tell me what isn't working, I tell you what I'd do and what it costs. If it's not me you need, I'll say so.
Or call 07700 900123. I reply within one working day.