Development

Custom web development services — we build the software we run our own businesses on

Matrix Health Group builds websites, online shops and the software that sits behind them. We are a company that had to build its own tools first, so the work on offer here is the work we already do for ourselves — on the systems that take our own orders.

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What we build

The whole thing, by the same people

Plenty of firms build the part you see and hand the rest to somebody else. The join between the two is where most of the cost and nearly all of the blame ends up, so we do not make one.

  1. The part people see

    Pages written by hand, so they load quickly and behave properly on a phone. Semantic HTML, stylesheets a person can read, and JavaScript only where it earns its place — no framework tax on a brochure site, and no monthly fee to a page-building tool just to edit your own words.

  2. The part they do not

    Where your information is kept, who is allowed to see it, and the jobs that quietly run overnight — databases, sign-in and permissions, scheduled work, and the interfaces that join them together. The half nobody demonstrates, and the half that decides whether the thing still works in a year.

  3. Talking to the other systems you use

    Payments, deliveries, your customer records, your accounts. We control none of them, so the joins are built to complain loudly and pick themselves back up: sensible retries, real error handling, and an alert to a person. The ones that fail silently are the expensive ones.

  4. WordPress, when WordPress is the right answer

    Sometimes it is, and we will say so when it is not. Custom themes and plugins, written properly, with no page builder in the middle. This site is one — built from scratch, nothing bought in — so you can read the source and judge the work before you speak to us.

  5. Fast and usable from the start

    Text people can actually read, pages that work without a mouse, and weight kept down. Contrast ratios, keyboard paths and page weight are settled while the thing is being built, which is the only point at which any of it is cheap.

  6. Built so you are not stuck with us

    Written to be handed over: commented where the reasoning is not obvious, documented where it matters, and no clever tricks that need us to explain them. You should be able to take it to another team. Most people who can, stay.

What it costs

Five things that move the number

We price each job rather than publishing a figure, because two projects that sound the same in a first conversation often are not, by a wide margin. What we can do is tell you plainly what makes the difference, so you can work out roughly where you sit before speaking to anyone — us included.

  1. How clear you already are

    Replacing something that works costs less than deciding what it should do. Projects run long when the answer to that is still being written while it is being built.

  2. How many other systems it touches

    One is a feature. Five means every one of those companies can now break your morning, and each brings its own outages and updates with it.

  3. How much you want to change yourself

    A page nobody edits is cheap. Every part you want to change without ringing us is a thing to design, explain and protect from mistakes — worth it where the content really moves, wasteful everywhere else.

  4. What happens when it goes wrong

    A brochure site breaking is embarrassing. Something holding money, stock or personal details is a different job, and the care around it costs what it costs.

  5. Whether it has to keep running

    Build it and hand it over, or look after it for years. Say which at the start, because it changes how the thing is built rather than just what it costs.

Our own work

Things you can go and look at

We have no client logos to show you. What we have instead is our own software in public, running our own businesses, where anyone can form their own view of it without taking our word for anything.

  • Two apps of our own, and a third on the phone stores

    Matrix Bundles is on the Shopify App Store. Matrix Rewards has its own site. Our phone app is on both the Apple and Android stores. All three are ours — designed, built, released and looked after by the same people who would build yours.

    Live

  • The website you are reading

    Built from scratch, with nothing bought in and no page-building tool. If you know how to look at how a website is made, look at this one — it was written by people expecting to be checked.

    You are on it

Tell us what it has to do

Not how you think it should be built — that is our problem. Tell us what it has to do, who for, and what goes wrong today without it. We will tell you what we would build and what it would take.

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