About
Good businesses with bad websites.
There is a particular kind of business we built Northstar for. It has been going for years. The work is genuinely good. The reviews say so. And the website looks like it was finished in a hurry in 2016 and never opened again.
That gap costs real money, quietly, every week — because the website is the first thing a new customer sees, and it is telling them the business is smaller and less established than it is.
The idea
Show the work first. Let the design make the argument instead of the sales call.
Most agency relationships start with a proposal, a deposit, and a few weeks of hoping. You are asked to buy a description of a website. Then you find out what you actually bought.
We would rather build the thing and show it to you. It costs us more up front and it means we turn down work we would otherwise take, but it puts the only question that matters — do you like it — before the invoice instead of after it.
It also keeps us honest. If the demo is not good enough to sell itself, that is our problem to fix, and we find out about it immediately rather than three weeks into a build.
What we won’t do
The commitments that cost us money.
Ask you to pay before you have seen anything.
This is the whole reason Northstar works the way it does. You see a real design built around your real business, and then you decide. The risk at the start of the relationship is ours, not yours.
Hand you a template with your logo dropped into it.
There is a whole industry doing that, and it is cheaper than us. If a template is genuinely what you need, we will tell you so and point you at one.
Build in an account you cannot take with you.
Your domain, your hosting, your data, your logins. If you ever stop working with us, the site keeps running and you keep the keys. Nothing here is built to trap you.
Show you someone else's numbers as a forecast of yours.
Case-study figures are evidence that something worked once, for one business, in one market. They are not a prediction about you, and we will not present them as one.
Ship a site we would not put our own name on.
This is the part that gets quietly dropped when a deadline slips. It does not get dropped here.
Where we are
Northstar is taking on a limited number of founding client projects. Early clients work directly with the founder through design, development and launch — there is no account manager and nothing gets handed to a junior.
You can judge us the same way we would judge anyone: open the builds, read the decisions inside them, and request a demo so you can see the thinking applied to your own business before any money changes hands. If the demo is useful and you do nothing else with us, that is a fine outcome.
The number of projects is limited by how many one person can build properly at a time. That is the only kind of scarcity we will ever put on this page.
Free custom website demo
You have already seen
what we can build.
Now see what we would build for you.
We build a custom demo of your new website — using your real business, services and reputation — and you decide whether you want it finished.
- A custom homepage concept built around your actual business
- Your services, your area, your reputation — not placeholder text
- Designed mobile-first, so you see it the way your customers will
- A walkthrough of what we changed and why
- No payment to see it, and no obligation afterwards
If the work does not make the case, do not hire us.
No payment is required to request a demo, and there is no obligation to buy. We build demos for a limited number of businesses at a time, so every request is reviewed before we start — if we are not the right fit, we will say so rather than waste your time.