Two build slots open from early March — scope reviews are booked within three working days.
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Independent practice · Remote, UK hours
Umber Crest is a solo design and front-end studio. I take on one marketing site or product page at a time, work in fixed-scope phases, and hand over plain, maintainable code you can edit without me.
Best suited to founders, small teams and in-house marketers who already know roughly what they need and want a single person accountable for design, build and launch.
The practice
I keep one project live at a time so the work gets real attention. That means fewer slots per year, clearer timelines, and no stretch of silence while your job sits behind someone else's.
Most of what I build is a five to twelve page site: positioning, a sensible page structure, type and layout decisions, then a hand-written front-end that loads fast on a phone. I write the markup myself, so performance and accessibility are decisions rather than afterthoughts.
Engagements
Each one is a fixed-scope phase with its own quote. Most clients begin with a diagnostic and decide afterwards whether a full build is worth it.
01
A written read of your current site: what the page is asking visitors to do, where the structure fights that, and what I would change first. Useful on its own even if you build it in-house.
02
One page that has to work hard — a launch page, a service page, a long-form pitch. Design and front-end in the same pass, so what you approve is what ships.
03
Five to twelve pages rebuilt from the structure up, with a small component set your team can reuse. For companies whose site has grown by accretion and now contradicts itself.
Selected work
Three representative jobs, described by what was actually done rather than by adjectives.
01
Full site rebuild · Workwear supplier
Nine overlapping pages collapsed into six. I rewrote the navigation around what buyers actually search for — sizing, lead times, bulk orders — and rebuilt the front-end so product tables stay readable on a phone in a van.
02
Single page, designed and built · Guided walks
A seasonal booking page for a two-person walking outfit. The work was mostly editing: one route list, honest difficulty descriptions, and a short enquiry form instead of the four-step flow they had been quoted elsewhere.
03
Diagnostic, then build · Small-batch coffee
Started as a one-week diagnostic. The main finding was that their wholesale offer was buried three clicks down; we promoted it to its own page and left the rest of the site alone, which kept the budget where it mattered.
How a project runs
Timings below are for a single-page engagement. A full rebuild follows the same shape with weekly checkpoints instead of two.
A short written exchange and one call. I send back the scope, the fixed fee and the dates I can hold. Nothing is booked until you agree all three.
Page order, what each section has to earn, and the type and colour decisions. Shown as one real layout in the browser, not a slide deck.
The page is built as we go, on a private preview link. You give notes in one pass; I group and apply them, then we do a second, shorter round.
Cross-device checks, images optimised, files handed over with a plain-language note on how to edit each section. Small fixes stay free for two weeks.
Useful questions
The questions that come up in almost every first call, answered plainly.
Scope review
A few lines is plenty. If a slot does not line up with your timeline, I will say so in the first reply rather than hold you waiting.