The Journal

Money and decisions

What things cost, and where the choices actually differ.

• What a hotel website actually costsA line-by-line breakdown of a boutique hotel build in 2026, including the ongoing costs most quotes leave out.
• Custom vs template: an honest comparisonWhere a template is genuinely right, and the point at which it starts costing more than bespoke work.
• Redesigning without losing your rankingsFive causes of a post-redesign traffic drop, and the ten-point pre-launch checklist that prevents all of them.

Hotels and resorts

The routing problem, and the photography that decides everything else.

• Why guests still book through an intermediaryIndependent hotels rarely have a traffic problem. They have a routing problem — and it is fixable in four moves.
• What to photograph before you brief a designerFive shot categories most properties are missing, and three to stop shooting.
• What we changed first when a hotel's booking path was losing guestsA walkthrough of where guests were being lost, what came out, and what was deliberately left alone.

Wineries and estates

Club growth, and when direct sales are not worth building.

• The page most wineries do not haveFour questions a club page must answer, and where the link actually belongs.

Restaurants and cafés

Menus, format, and doing less on purpose.

• Your menu should not be a PDFThe same menu in four formats, and the doorway test that tells you which one you have.
• A café website that does one thingFour questions, answered fast, and what to leave out.
• Rebuilding a menu page the kitchen could actually updateA PDF, an agency and four days per change. What replaced it, and why allergens went on the dish record.

Venues and institutions

Longer decisions, longer lifetimes.

• The questions couples ask before they callA couple is eliminating, not browsing. The site has to survive the shortlist first.
• Rebuilding a venue's enquiry flow without touching the designForty enquiries a month and a two-to-four day reply. What we changed in the first forty-eight hours.
• Websites that have to lastDesigning for the institution's life rather than the funding cycle.
• Multilingual sites that do not compete with themselvesSeparate URLs, hreflang in both directions, and self-referencing canonicals.

Design discipline

What restraint actually buys.

• Why calm is the hardest thing to designCalm is not a palette. It is the number of things you agree not to do.
• Fewer pages, written properlyThe sixteen-page site that says nothing loses to the five-page site that says something.

More is written when a project teaches something worth writing down, not to fill a calendar. If there is a subject you would like covered, say so and it will be considered.