May 2026
I build the public-facing part of your website by hand, using two tools called Vue and Vite. You don't need to know what those are, and after this post you still won't have to think about them. But you hired a person, not a template factory, so I think you deserve to know why I made this choice and what you actually get out of it. The short version: your site loads fast, it's easy to change, and it doesn't quietly rot over the years the way most sites do.
Let me back up and explain in plain English, because both of these names sound like nonsense if you don't write code for a living.
What these two tools actually do (no jargon, I promise)
Think of your website as a building. There's the part your customers walk into and look at and click around in. That's the "front-end" — the storefront. Then there's the back office where you and I manage the content, which in my case is my own system called Gravity Fox. This post is about the storefront.
Vue is how I build that storefront. Its big trick is something the tech world calls "reactivity," which is a fancy word for a simple idea: when something on the page needs to change, only that one thing changes — instantly — instead of the whole page reloading. Picture a menu where someone filters to "vegetarian only." With Vue, the list just rearranges in front of them, smooth and immediate, like flipping a card on a table. No blink, no white flash, no waiting. That responsiveness is a big part of what makes a site feel modern and expensive instead of clunky and dated.
Vue also lets me build your site out of reusable pieces — think LEGO bricks. Your "request a quote" box, your service cards, your photo galleries: each is built once, properly, and then reused everywhere it's needed. So when you say "can we change the button on every page," that's one change, not forty. You pay for less of my time, and there are fewer places for something to break.
Vite is the workshop I build in. Its whole reason for existing is speed — speed for me while I'm building, and speed for your customers when they visit. While I'm working, I can make a change and see it on screen instantly, which means I iterate faster and catch problems sooner. And when the site is finished, Vite packages everything up into the leanest, fastest possible version to ship to the world. It strips out the dead weight and squeezes what's left, so your pages arrive quickly even on a phone with one bar of signal in a parking lot.
Why this matters for your business, not just for me
Here's the thing — a slow website costs you money quietly. Nobody emails to tell you they left because your page took four seconds to load; they just leave, and you never knew they were there. A fast site keeps people around long enough to actually call you, fill out the form, or walk in the door. That's the entire point of the thing.
Fast pages also help you get found in the first place. Google has said for years that speed factors into rankings, and the same lean, well-built pages that load quickly for a human are the ones that search engines — and now AI answer engines — can read cleanly and recommend. So the build choice and the SEO work aren't separate things; they're the same craftsmanship pointed at two audiences. If you want the bigger picture on how I approach all of this, it's on my services page.
And then there's the thing nobody warns you about: most websites get worse over time. They get built, they sit there, and three years later they're slow, creaky, and a security liability — because the technology underneath them aged and nobody touched it. I refuse to run that way.
How I keep your site from going stale
Because Vue and Vite are modern, actively-maintained tools, the sites I build sit on a foundation that keeps improving instead of decaying. But "modern at launch" isn't good enough — software keeps moving. So I built a tool of my own, run carefully with AI doing the heavy lifting under my supervision, that I call night-fox-trainers. When a major update to the underlying technology comes out, it upgrades my entire fleet of sites in sync — hundreds of them — and tests as it goes.
What that means for you, in practical terms: your site quietly gets faster and more secure over the years instead of slower and more fragile. In the vast majority of cases I don't send you an invoice for it — the rare exception is a true rescue job on a badly-neglected site, which I scope and quote up front. I do it because leaving your site to rot would be the wrong way to run this, and because doing all the sites together is the only way one person can afford to do it at all. It's a chunk of the robust setup the big firms charge a fortune for, minus the overhead that makes it cost a fortune.
This is also why I don't use WordPress or off-the-shelf templates. There's a whole sea of identical-looking sites out there, and in the AI era that sameness is a real liability — when everything looks and reads the same, nothing stands out, to a customer or to a search engine. Anyone can paste AI slop into a template and call it a website. I'd rather hand-build yours so it's genuinely yours, and so it pairs cleanly with the back office where you'll actually manage your content. If you want to see what hand-built looks like in practice, my portfolio is the honest answer.
The part where you come in
I'll be straight with you: the tools are my half of the bargain. I bring the engineering and the craft, the way an architect brings the engineering to your house. But you know your business in a way I never will — your customers, your busy season, the questions people always ask, the jobs you actually want more of. The clients who tell me those things get noticeably better sites than the ones who hand me a logo and disappear. Good websites are a collaboration, not a vending machine.
If that sounds like the way you'd want to work, here's how I approach web design and development, and you can always just get a quote and tell me about your business. No minimum, no lock-in, and the site I build will still be fast and current years from now — which, honestly, is the whole reason I picked these tools in the first place.