About
One person, start to finish
The person who quotes the work builds it, and answers the phone afterwards. There is no account manager in between and nobody learning the job on your budget.
Who you are dealing with
Hi, I'm Richard
My career has been in product management in New Zealand telecommunications, in the roles where the technology, the customer and the commercial case all have to line up. I have seen more than once what it costs an organisation when a system nobody owns quietly stops working.
Ironsand Systems came out of watching that happen to small organisations. They buy a website as a project. It launches, and then it drifts. The plugins age, nobody checks the backups, and the person who built it moves on to other work. Most of a website's life happens after launch, and that is the part nobody is paid to look after.
So the offer is narrow on purpose. I build the site, then keep it running for a monthly fee that covers hosting, backups, monitoring, security updates and your content changes. You deal with me the whole way through, and if you ever want to leave, you keep your domain, code and content.
How I work
Four things you can hold me to
Direct partnership
You deal with the person building the site. There is no account manager relaying your question to someone you never meet, and no junior learning on your budget.
Craft over speed
Sites are built rather than assembled from a template with the colours changed. That takes longer at the start and costs less for the years afterwards, which is the part most quotes leave out.
Fixed price, written down
The build is quoted as a fixed price against a written scope. If the scope changes, the price is requoted before the work starts rather than appearing on an invoice afterwards.
You can leave
Your domain is registered in your name from day one. On termination, with the account settled, you get your code, content, database and media within twenty working days in a portable format.
What I build
Where the depth actually is
Being found
Markup that search engines and the newer answer engines can both read, a site fast enough that speed is never the reason a page ranks poorly, and structured data that describes what your organisation actually is.
Interface and motion
Interfaces that respond immediately and move only where movement helps someone understand what just happened. Motion that runs at full frame rate on a mid-range phone, or it does not ship.
Online stores
Storefronts where browsing happens on your own site and checkout is handled by a commerce platform you hold in your own name, which keeps payment liability and card data off our side of the line and out of your risk register.
Operational automation
The repetitive parts of running an organisation wired together, so an enquiry, a booking or a form arrives where the work happens rather than in an inbox someone has to re-key it out of.
The solo question
Why one person rather than a firm
Direct communication
You have my phone number and my email. A technical question gets a technical answer from the person who built the site, usually the same day, and never a summary of a summary.
Senior judgement on every change
I use AI-assisted tools, as most developers now do. Everything they produce is read, tested and answered for by someone who has done this long enough to know which shortcuts cost money later. Nothing is handed to whoever was free.
Less overhead in the price
No office, no sales team and no layer of management sitting between your budget and the work. What you pay for is the build and the keeping of it.
Known limits
One person has a ceiling, and the book is deliberately sized to stay under it. If a project needs more capacity than I have, you will be told that rather than sold it anyway.
Tell me what the site has to do
Describe the organisation and what you need the site to do, and you will get a straight answer about whether this is a good fit. If it is not, I will say so and tell you what I would do instead.