About
A small studio for unglamorous problems.
Latchford builds websites that answer what customers keep phoning to ask, and software that takes the repeat work off a team. For small and mid-sized businesses across Canada and the US.
Why this exists
Most small businesses have been sold the wrong thing
Ask an owner what happened last time they paid for a website and you tend to hear one of two stories. Either they got something beautiful that nobody could find and nobody could edit, or they got a template with their logo dropped into it and a bill that arrived every month afterwards for reasons nobody could name.
Both stories have the same root. The work was sold as a deliverable — a site, a design, a package — instead of as an answer to a specific problem the business already had. Nobody asked which questions the phone keeps ringing with, or which job somebody on staff does by hand every Friday afternoon. So nothing that got built could possibly have fixed either one.
This studio starts at the other end. We ask how the business actually gets work today, find the part of it that is costing you evenings or customers, and build the smallest thing that fixes it properly. Sometimes that is a website. Sometimes it is a quoting tool. Occasionally it is neither, and the useful thing we can do is tell you so.
How we work
Five things that do not change
Every one of these is a promise you can hold us to, not a value on a wall.
A fixed price, agreed before we start
One number against a written scope. It moves only if you ask for something that scope does not cover, and then only after you have seen what the addition costs on its own.
A written scope, so nothing is implied
Page by page, screen by screen, in language you can check. If it is not in the scope it is not in the build, and that protects you far more than it protects us.
A staging link, from the first week
You can open the thing we are building at any hour without asking. Progress is not a status report you have to trust — it is a URL.
You own all of it, from day one
The code, the domain, the hosting, the analytics, every account. All in your name rather than ours. Leaving is a transfer, not a negotiation, and nothing is held hostage to keep you.
We are here after launch
Launch day is the middle of the story. What we built has to keep working when your hours change, when a service gets added, and when something breaks at an inconvenient time.
What we don't do
The work we turn down
A studio that says yes to everything is telling you nothing. These are the jobs we send elsewhere.
Monthly retainers for work nobody can point at
Rebuilds sold to a business whose site is fine and whose problem is elsewhere
Marketing campaigns, ad buying, and social media management
Software built to impress an investor rather than to be used on a Tuesday
Who we build for
Businesses where the work is real
Trades, clinics, restaurants, real estate, retail and studios, professional services. Different trades, the same two problems: being found, and being buried in repeat work.
The proof
Three projects, and we will not pretend there are thirty
There are three finished website projects behind this studio, and each one has a case study you can read in full — what the business was losing, what we built, and what changed afterwards.
Everywhere else on this site where we describe work we have not done yet, it is written in the conditional and labelled as such. That is a deliberate rule, and it is the reason you can trust the three that are real.
Read the case studiesTell us what you're trying to get done.We'll tell you what it takes.