The site that waited for a piece of paper.

This one is not a client project and it is not really a software project either. It is a small local business that happens to have been built by someone who makes websites, which turns out to be a useful way to find out how much of the job is not the website.

Making it look nothing like me

The site you are reading is dark, severe, mono numerals, a lot of black. If I had let my hands do what they wanted, Arwyn & The Pack would have come out as the same site with a dog on it.

So it is deliberately the opposite. Warm cream, sage green, soft serif headings with a handwritten accent, generous and a bit informal. It is one page, static, no framework at all, because a dog walker’s website that takes a second to load on a phone in a field is a worse product than one that does not.

I have a rule that no two things I build are allowed to share a visual grammar. It sounds like vanity. It is actually the whole argument for hiring a person instead of buying a theme: if my sites all looked alike, the honest thing would be to sell you the theme and go home.

The spreadsheet that argued with the website

I did the pricing the way most people start a small business, which is to say I looked at what everyone else charged and sat just under it. Then I did the arithmetic properly — travel time between houses, the minutes at each end that nobody bills for, the walk itself, the insurance, the phone, the petrol.

A finished website is not the same thing as a business that is ready to take money.

The answer was uncomfortable. Solo walks barely wash their face. The pack walks — a small, carefully matched group — are where the whole thing actually works, because the travel and the admin are paid for once and divided several ways.

I kept the solo walks anyway, knowingly, as the way in for older or anxious dogs who would have a miserable time in a group. But I now know which of my own services is the loss leader, which is more than most small businesses can say about theirs. That is not a website feature. No amount of good design would have told me.

The paper

Here is the bit I am actually proud of, and it is the least interesting to look at.

The site was finished and I did not launch it, because I did not yet have insurance. Not “had applied for.” Had. Taking money to be alone with somebody’s dog, and holding somebody’s house keys, without cover in place is not a corner you get to cut on the grounds that the odds are good.

When the policy did land I went back and rewrote the trust line on the site. It had said “fully insured,” which is what every competitor says and which means nothing. It now names the actual numbers — a million pounds of public liability, a hundred thousand for a dog injured in my care, ten thousand as a key-holder with no excess. Specific, checkable, and quietly impossible for a rival to match without going and buying the same cover.

The same instinct produced the rest of the paperwork nobody asks for: a one-page walking agreement covering emergency vet authority and key handling, a privacy policy and terms written for the actual situation rather than copied off a template site, and a written plan for the ten things that can genuinely go wrong — a dog off its lead and gone, a scrap between two dogs, an injury, a lost key. Decided in advance, on a calm afternoon, rather than invented at speed in a field.

What I’d tell a client from this

That building the website is the fun quarter of starting something, and if a web designer tells you otherwise they are selling you the quarter they enjoy.

When a client comes to me with a new venture I now ask questions that are none of my business. Are you insured for this. What happens when the first one goes wrong. Do you know which of these services actually makes money, or do you know which one is busiest. It slows the first conversation down and occasionally it stops a project, which is a strange thing to volunteer for.

But a beautiful site for a business that cannot safely take the booking is not a win. I would rather build you a plain one in a month, when you are ready, than a gorgeous one on Friday that invites a problem you have no answer for.

Build notes · Published 2 August 2026 · Beverley · See the work →