We open your site on a phone
Before anything is designed, we look at what you have the way your customers do: on a phone, on a bad connection, in daylight. What’s slow, what’s unreadable and what’s missing gets written down first.
Merritt Digital
Design studio · Alameda
This page is the portfolio.
You are inside the canopy of an oak half-turned for autumn, on the shore of Lake Merritt. Every branch and every leaf of it is real geometry, grown from a few hundred lines of code rather than downloaded, and turned by your scroll. It was built the way we build for clients: one page, no framework, no template. Keep going: it falls the length of the tree, bounces off the ground, and opens out over the water to Oakland.
Scroll into the tree
A capability you can’t inspect is just a claim.
So this section audits the page you are standing on, on your device, on this load. Open the developer tools and check any line of it.
- Dimension
- 169,298 lines 90,843 of them leaves
- The whole tree is one primitive: a line with a colour at each end. There is no model file and no image of any kind in this page — not a texture, not a photograph — so every one of those lines is grown from a few hundred lines of code and one fixed number, which is why all that detail costs nothing to send you. Drawn in 16 passes, of which most are the glow.
- Frame
- 60 fps
- The tree renders only when something actually changes. Stop scrolling and it stops working, which is why this doesn’t flatten a battery or an older tablet.
- Letterform
- 3 cuts 24 kB
- Libre Caslon Display for the things of value, Archivo for the apparatus, self-hosted and subset to only the glyphs this page sets. No font network, no tracking.
- Weight
- — kB
- Everything it took to give you this: markup, styles, three faces, the 3D engine and the tree itself. No tracker, no tag manager, no cookie banner, no font CDN. None of the weight that usually arrives before the content does.
- Floor
- Complete without JavaScript
- Turn it off, refuse the 3D, browse on a decade-old phone. The page still reads, still navigates, still tells you what it costs. Nothing here is load-bearing decoration.
Figures from our reference run; they measure themselves live once scripting is on.
One afternoon, four moves.
The same sequence every time, which is the only reason a free demo is possible at all. Discipline, not heroics.
We find the object you already own
Every business has one thing its customers already trust: the packaging, the certificate, the storefront, the logo that hasn’t changed in thirty years. We name what makes that object work, and the site becomes it. That is why our sites don’t look like each other.
We build the real thing
Not a mockup and not a theme. One page of hand-written code, no framework, with one element carrying real live data, composed three separate times for phone, tablet and desktop. The oak behind you is what this move looks like at full stretch.
We put it at a real address
It goes live the same day at an address you can open, share and sleep on, with a printed pitch to keep. Nothing is owed for any of it. If it isn’t obviously better than what you have, we’ve both learned something cheaply.
The prices are on the website. All of them.
A studio that hides its rates is telling you the number depends on how you look. Here is the whole structure, in public, before you ever write to us.
The Demo a working site at a live address$0
Launch your demo, made production-real$2,500
Signature your brand as an experience$6,000–$12,000
Care hosting, security, the site kept currentfrom $149/mo
Nothing down Launch and Care bundled$249/mo
We never discount the build; when it helps to meet you partway we comp months of Care instead. Ranges are scoped in writing before work starts and land on one fixed, itemised number. Ratified 2026-07-06.
Alameda · Oakland · the lake we are named for.
Merritt Digital builds on this side of the bay.