I build small web products
and run the ones that work.

I'm William, a developer in Johannesburg. I build web products and then run them, which means I do the design, the code, the deploys and the support emails. It's a useful discipline, since you stop shipping things that are clever to build and annoying to own.

Lumen is the main one. It's a site system for wedding photographers, sold as a build plus a monthly care plan rather than a one-off. Every client site runs off the same codebase and one config file, so a new one goes live in an afternoon instead of a fortnight.

I still take client work when the fit is right, usually small businesses who need one site that works properly and then stays out of their way. In practice that means pages that load in about a second on a phone with bad signal, forms that actually submit, and layouts that hold together at 320 pixels wide. I care about accessibility, because a site people can't use isn't finished.

When I'm not building, I'm usually climbing or picking apart some technology I have no immediate use for.