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
Oakland · Alameda
We build it. You own it.
We are a small Oakland studio, and we started Merritt Digital because the web got expensive for the people who need it most. A shop, a garage, a restaurant, a one-person trade — all of them get quoted a monthly fee forever, and half of them do not really own the site they are paying for. So we do it the other way round. We build yours, hand you the keys, and step back: the files, the domain and the hosting all in your name, with nothing left switched on at our end. If you come back to us later, it is because the work earned it, not because a contract says you have to.
What that looks like
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
- 81 frames not a video
- The film behind this page is a sequence of still frames, drawn to a canvas and indexed by how far you have scrolled. That is why it runs backwards the instant you scroll up, and why there is no audio to mute. You see the whole frame, uncropped, at every screen size.
- Frame
- Readable before any of it loads
- The first still is part of the page itself, so you can read every word and reach the prices before a single frame of the film has arrived. The rest streams in behind it, coarse first and then sharper. If your connection gives out halfway, the page is still right — you simply keep the still.
- 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 page — the film
- The first figure is everything needed to read this page: markup, styles, three typefaces and the script. The second is the film, which arrives afterwards and never blocks you. 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 one person can do this properly at this price. 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. Everything moving on this page was built the same way.
We hand you the keys
It goes live at an address you can open, share and sleep on — and from that moment it is yours. The files, the domain and the hosting account are all set up in your name, so there is nothing we can switch off and nothing you have to keep paying us to keep.
Custom websites, starting from $200 USD
A studio that hides its rates is telling you the number depends on how you look. Ours is on the website, before you ever write to us.
Once we build it, it is yours the design, the files, the domain and the hosting, all in your nameoutright
No subscription we do not host your site and we hold no keys to it$0/mo
Anything after launch quoted case by case and billed for the time it takesby the hour
Support is not a plan: there is nothing to sign up for and nothing to cancel. Work after launch is agreed and quoted in writing before it starts, and invoiced once it is done. If you never speak to us again, your website carries on working.
Come back on merit, not obligation.
Merritt Digital · named for the lake, built on this side of the bay.