About

I have built websites for more than twenty years, and I have run Ridgeway Web full-time since 2023. Before that, for thirteen years, I directed a high school choir. Those two facts sit next to each other oddly enough that people usually ask about it, so I will get it out of the way here rather than leaving it as a line item.

What thirteen years of choir actually taught me

A choir is not one voice; it is dozens of them, each reading a different line on the page, each capable of being slightly wrong in a way that ruins the whole. You do not fix that by telling everyone to sing louder. You fix it by rehearsing the same sixteen bars until the sopranos stop rushing the entrance, then moving on to the next sixteen, then coming back to the first sixteen a week later because it slipped again. That is the actual work of directing a choir: relentless, unglamorous iteration on small sections until they hold up inside the larger piece.

A website is put together the same way, if you are doing it honestly. Navigation, forms, page speed, how a heading reads on a phone screen — each one is its own small section, and each one can be quietly wrong in a way that undermines the whole site without being obvious from a glance. I approach a build the way I approached a rehearsal: build a piece, test it, come back to it, and do not call it finished because it looked fine once.

The other half of the job was never the music. It was standing in front of sixty teenagers and explaining why the alto line needed to breathe in a different place, in terms that made sense to someone who had never read a score and did not want a lecture on voice leading. That is most of what a web designer does too. Clients do not want to hear about render-blocking scripts or structured data; they want to know whether their new site will help someone find them and call. Thirteen years of translating technical decisions into plain reasons someone would actually care about is not a credential I can put on a diploma, but it shapes every conversation I have with a client.

How I got here

I started building websites more than twenty years ago, back when doing it "by hand" was not a stylistic choice — it was the only way to do it. I kept building through the page-builder era without ever switching to one, partly out of stubbornness and partly because I kept noticing that hand-coded sites loaded faster and broke less. When I left the choir room in 2023, Ridgeway Web became the full-time version of something I had already been doing on the side for years. The skills did not transfer in some poetic metaphorical sense — they transferred literally. Both jobs are about taking something with a lot of moving parts and making it work as one thing, on a deadline, for an audience that will notice if it does not.

What working with one person actually means

There is no account manager here, no ticket queue, and no one you get handed off to once the contract is signed. The person who quotes your project is the same person who designs it, builds it, and picks up the phone a year later when you need something changed. That is a real, specific difference from hiring an agency, where the person who sold you the project is often not the person who builds or maintains it.

It also has an honest downside, and I would rather say it plainly than let you find out later: I am a single point of failure. If I am sick, on vacation, or simply slammed with three other projects in the same week, there is no second designer to pick up the slack while you wait. An agency can staff around someone being out; I cannot. What I can do is tell you early when a stretch is busy, so a deadline gets set with that in mind rather than promised and missed. That is a real tradeoff, and you should weigh it against the tradeoffs of the agency model — slower communication, more hand-offs, less continuity between the person who understood your business and the person doing the work — before deciding which one you would rather live with.

How I work

Every site is hand-coded — plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with nothing running in the background that your business doesn't need. No WordPress, no Squarespace, no framework installed because it's standard rather than because your project called for it. Before any of that, though, comes a conversation: what your business actually does, who you're trying to reach, and whether what you're asking for is really the thing that will help. Sometimes the honest answer is smaller than what you walked in wanting, and I'll say so rather than sell you the bigger version.

I am based in Birmingham, AL, and I meet local clients in person around the metro area when that is useful. Most of the work, local or not, happens by phone, email and video call, and clients outside Alabama make up a real share of what I do. Wherever you are, I reply within 24 hours, usually the same day.

Who this is a good fit for

I work best with owners who want one person who knows their site well, answers directly, and sticks around after launch rather than disappearing once the invoice clears — a landscaper juggling the office himself, a dentist's practice manager, a shop owner who would rather spend an afternoon with a customer than a web form. If you want to own your site outright and touch it as little as possible after launch, or you want a monthly partner who keeps making edits as your business changes, either one is a normal way to work with me, and the pricing page lays out what each model actually includes.

I am not the right fit if you need a procurement process, a team of account managers, or guaranteed same-day coverage regardless of who is out sick. Those are legitimate needs — a one-person shop just cannot promise to meet them, and better you hear that up front than discover it partway through a project.

If any of that sounds like a fit, take a look at the services I offer or browse the portfolio of sites I have built, then get in touch and tell me about your business.