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Foundations
Notes, updates, and the occasional deeper read from Tropic Arts.
Most people choose a plumber on their phone, in a hurry, from three or four names, and your website has seconds to show you're real, nearby and ready to take the call. Someone…
Read the story →GoDaddy is best known for domain names, but it also sells website builders, backed by phone support around the clock. It has 20.5 million customers. Tropic Arts is much smaller.…
Read the story →Squarespace and Tropic Arts share one idea: a small business deserves a beautiful, professional website without hiring a designer. Squarespace has been making websites since 2003,…
Read the story →WordPress runs about 40% of all websites, according to W3Techs, more than any other system, and for good reason: it's free, it's open source, and with enough plugins it can do…
Read the story →Wix and Tropic Arts promise the same thing: a professional website you can build and run yourself, without hiring a developer. They get there in different ways. Wix gives you a…
Read the story →A shop starts every month at zero. Whatever you sold in March has no bearing on April; the counter resets and you go again. Most small businesses run this way and most owners have…
Read the story →Someone visits your site on a Sunday evening, decides they want an appointment, and finds a phone number. They can't ring on a Sunday evening, so they send an email instead. You…
Read the story →A growing share of the questions your customers used to type into a search box are now typed into something that answers back. They ask an assistant who repairs a wobbly dining…
Read the story →Most people never think about how their website template is put together, and mostly they shouldn't have to. But the architecture underneath a template decides things you feel…
Read the story →Most people use about a third of what the editor can do. They change the words, swap a few pictures, and stop — not because they're incurious, but because nobody told them the…
Read the story →You've signed up. The account is open, the templates are there, and you have that specific feeling of standing in a room you've just been handed the keys to — excited, and not…
Read the story →Most people who set out to build a website stall in the same place. Not at the design, and not at the technology — at the blank page. There's a template open, a cursor blinking in…
Read the story →Choosing a template is the most enjoyable part of building a site and the part people most reliably get wrong. Not because they pick an ugly one — they almost never do — but…
Read the story →Speed is the only part of your website's design that every single visitor experiences, including the ones who leave before seeing anything else. It's also the one nobody…
Read the story →Most small-business websites describe. A short paragraph about what the business does, a list of services, a grid of products, a contact form. Everything a visitor asked for,…
Read the story →Photography is the single biggest visual difference between a site that looks professional and one that doesn't — bigger than the template, bigger than the colours, bigger than…
Read the story →You built your site on a laptop. You review it on a laptop. When you show it to someone, you turn the laptop around. Most of your visitors will never see that version. They'll…
Read the story →Nobody sets out to build a website with eleven subscriptions attached to it. It happens the way most expensive things happen — one reasonable decision at a time. You need a…
Read the story →A first-time visitor to your site is running a quiet risk assessment, and they're doing it fast. Is this a real business? Will my card be safe? If something goes wrong, will…
Read the story →Home pages get the attention. Product pages make the money. By the time someone reaches a product page they've already decided they're interested — the page's only job now is to…
Read the story →There's a moment, looking at your own site, where you know something is off but can't say what. The content is right. The photos are decent. It just looks — homemade. And because…
Read the story →Choosing where your website lives is one of those decisions that feels straightforward until you're deep into it. The comparison charts blur together, the pricing is never…
Read the story →Search engine optimisation has a reputation problem. It sounds technical, it's sold by people with an interest in making it sound complicated, and the advice available online is a…
Read the story →A visitor arrives with something in mind. Maybe it's specific — a size, a colour, a service. Maybe it's vague, a sense of “something like this.” Either way, the next thirty…
Read the story →There's a difference between going live and launching well. Going live is a button. Launching is the sequence of decisions around it — what's ready, what's tested, who knows, and…
Read the story →Walk past a good shop in October and again in December and it's recognisably the same shop, differently arranged. The window has changed, the front table has changed, and…
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