Why this site looks like this

This page is the starting point for every site I build. Not a demo of one, the actual base layer: semantic HTML, system fonts, one stylesheet, no scripts, no trackers, no framework. Every project starts here and gets built up.

Most agencies work the other way. They start from a template that already does forty things, then spend the budget switching off the thirty-two the client does not need. What is left is slow, fragile, and impossible to hand to anyone else.

The 80/20 part: roughly 80% of what any site needs is the same for everyone, and it is all on this site already. The remaining 20% is what makes it yours, and that is where your money should go. Starting from nothing means all of it does.

The shape underneath

Strip away the branding and nearly every small-business site is the same handful of pages in the same arrangement. A front door, a few pages that explain who you are and what you have done, a place where new material accumulates, and a way to get in touch. That is the 80%.

What changes between clients is not the skeleton. It is the vocabulary, the proportions, what deserves prominence, and which of these boxes turns out to matter most. A dental practice needs the contact path to be short and obvious. A consultancy lives or dies on the archive. A restaurant needs the menu to be a real page rather than a PDF. Same bones, different animal.

Because the bones already exist and I did not buy them from anyone, none of your budget goes toward removing things you never asked for.