Ethical, straightforward website development.
Strategic design and layout to meet your needs.
Custom coded to meet your website needs.
User-friendly content management.
Privacy-first websites with no cookie banners.
Fast, sustainable, UK-based hosting.
Working with us
We have a well-practised development pipeline to deliver your website to our high standards of quality without any delays. No surprises, minimal effort from you. A typical project for us consists of at least one of the following stages. You can read about them below, or download our full Terms of Business (opens in new tab).
Discovery
01
An in-depth planning phase to agree a set of deliverables for your project and create a clear roadmap to realise them.
We’ll review your existing web presence, analyse visitor behaviour, and diagnose the business needs the website needs to fulfil.
This is a highly collaborative phase, where initial hypotheses will be validated before we produce the Proposal document and presentation.
Development
02
Work begins on the website. We’ll build the website to the exact specification agreed in the Discovery proposal.
Work will be split between back-end sprints to implement requested features, and front-end design work.
A staging site will be live during this phase where you can view progress on the website. We’ll be available to chat throughout the process.
Review
03
Once the website is fully developed, we’ll submit it to you for review, where you can send us any and all additions, revisions, or corrections.
The number of review stages is agreed during the Discovery phase, any additional reviews incur an additional charge. Review periods are also time-limited to 48-hours.
This is done to ensure each review moves the project forward in a meaningful way.
Publication
04
Your website is published to the internet!
We’ll carry out acceptance tests on the published site to keep it speedy, secure and accessible.
You’ll get credentials to the content management system (secured with 2FA) and an induction on how to edit the copy, images and published documents on the site.
We’ll also discuss options for ongoing website technical support and content updates.
*We know that numbered cards are the latest trend in AI generated websites. We promise that our numbered cards predate this trend, and were created with 100% human ingenuity.
A good website is an ethical website
What is an ethical website, and why should you want one? Put simply, we’ve made choices in building our development process that means we ship projects that are sustainable, accessible, and discreet. We’ve done this both because we believe in these principles, and because we believe that they make our work better.
Accessibility
by design
The internet should be for everyone, but we too often see accessibility treated as an optional extra rather than an essential component.
This means that a majority of websites unintentionally block millions of users and search engines alike because they forget about accessibility.
Internet users with visual impairments or motility issues rely on screen readers and keyboards to navigate websites. It’s not just human users that benefit from accessibility best practices: search engines use the same assistive technologies to crawl, index, rank your site.
We adopt the principle of Universal Design when building our websites, as it has been shown that accessible design benefits everyone.
We’re on a mission to prove that well-designed, impactful websites are not mutually exclusive with accessibility.
Privacy
by default
Have you ever visited a website and been peppered with privacy banners and notifications? We have, and we find it just as annoying.
However, most websites ask to download invasive files to their users devices when they have very little need to. Google Analytics is overkill for most small businesses and sole traders.
Meaningful data can be derived without sharing a user’s personal information with a third party. Our go-to privacy-by-default analytics platform is OpenPanel Analytics, which we can run on a sustainably powered server with our hosting partner.
Google Analytics 4 is adapting to a more privacy-aware internet, and is reducing its reliance on tracking cookies. It still has some way to go, but it’s a step in the right direction. Until it gets there, we’ll continue to advocate for cookie-less browsing.
Sustainability
by development
We partner with Krystal to deliver our websites and cloud services from their 100% renewable energy-powered data centres. To acknowledge this, you can choose to display a green web badge from the Green Web Foundation on your website, like the one below.
Our commitment to sustainable websites doesn’t stop at handing over responsibility to our web host. Keeping websites lean and fast also helps to reduce the energy consumption of the website.
That means optimising media, keeping the codebase lean, and most of all making the website user-friendly so that visitors can find what they’re looking for in the shortest time frame.
*We know that numbered cards are the latest trend in AI generated websites. We promise that our numbered cards predate this trend, and were created with 100% human ingenuity.
About us
We’re a Chichester-based husband and wife team who pride ourselves on producing outstanding, original work.
Christopher Johnston
Director, Designer, Developer
A piano teacher for over ten years, I’ve always loved designing things. Finding excuses to exercise my designer muscle was always a huge source of joy in my role. The website I designed for my teaching practice brings in more enquiries than I can handle. Wanting to focus on a smaller group of students, I decided to offer my web design services to other small businesses, to help them carve out a little corner of the internet for themselves.
While I still keep a small, dedicated roster of students, I have pivoted into web development full-time since 2023. Having started at the back-end as a data engineer, I’ve slowly moved back to the front end (although, my Python knowledge still comes in useful!)
Before I started Black and White, I worked as a freelance developer building everything from apps to data pipelines. I finally settled on web development, simply because there were too many people who knew me that wouldn’t stop asking for websites.
I named the company Black and White partly as a nod to my background as a pianist, but mostly because I believe that regardless of which industry your expertise lies, the service you provide should be clear and transparent. It’s easy as a developer to hide our defects behind opaque technical explanations, so I started Black and White to serve clients who value clear deliverables over jargon.
Katie Johnston
Content editor, acceptance tester
Having worked as a Key Stage 2 teacher for four years, I’ve developed a keen eye for detail. A change in leadership at my school in 2025 was the perfect opportunity to move from checking my students’ work to checking my husband’s!
While Chris handles the design and development, I keep a keen eye on the copy. I’m fully trained on the content management systems we use, and I handle most content updates after the sites are published.
I’ll also carry out the Acceptance Tests that take place in the Publication Phase. I’ve always been impatient with technology, and Chris knows if he gives me a website to test that is slow or awkward to use, it’s going to have a hard time passing. Nothing goes to Review stage without going through me first, and we’ve worked together to define a comprehensive suite of performance, security, accessibility tests to ensure the websites we ship are production-quality.
Outside of working with Chris, I have my own creative streak, running my custom doggy crochet business, Milo & Me. If you ever need to track me down for a content edit, just follow the trail of wool cuttings to wherever I’m working!
My professional services come as one of a pair with our dog, Milo, who has been unwittingly designated as the company mascot. Chris loves to use photos of him as placeholder images on sites he’s working on, so if you ever see Milo during the Development phase, now you know why!
Some of our work
We pride ourselves on our work. Below are some of the projects we’ve completed, which showcase the variety of work we undertake. We don’t stick to a single solution, because not every website wants to be an Elementor WordPress site!
Sophie Robinson Photo
WordPress, Custom In-house theme
Sophie had a very clear mental model of her website, with licenced typefaces and six complementary brand colours already chosen.
As Sophie wanted maximum customisation and control, we built her website with our in-house WordPress theme, Graphite.
We developed Graphite from scratch to add powerful functionality and a coherent design system to WordPress, while retaining the look and feel of WordPress.
This means that, for those familiar with WordPress, the editing experiences is indistinguishable from a native WordPress site.
Much of the back-end work involved performance optimisations for this photo-heavy site, along with shipping some purpose-built custom blocks with the Graphite theme.
CFMDS
Strapi back-end Custom-coded front-end
Chichester Festival for Music, Dance and Speech wanted a fresh website that interacted with their entry management system, Play&Perform.
Play&Perform is the source of truth for all Festival data, including hundreds of entries on classes, sections, and adjudicators. All of this had to be typed out again on their old website.
We worked with the team from Play&Perform to establish a secure gateway between their festival management service and the CFMDS website.
Now, the CFMDS website automatically fetches the festival data from Play&Perform. No more duplication, half the work for the site editors, and the redesign was a bonus!
The website front-end uses the same SPA framework we developed for terenceallbright.com to keep it speedy.
Thurton & Ashby St Mary Preschool
Strapi back-end Custom-coded front-end
Thurton & Ashby St Mary Preschool were seeking a new website. While they felt their existing would benefit from a refreshed look, their greater need was for a frictionless editing experience.
The preschool team is largely made up of volunteer parents, with fairly high churn due to the narrow age range. The site is frequently updated with term dates, school events and staff qualifications.
This meant the edits came thick and fast, and onboarding new staff members needed to be a smooth as possible.
We moved them from WordPress Elementor to Strapi, a modern content-management system designed from the ground-up to be a minimal and user-friendly editing experience.
The website front-end uses the same SPA framework we developed for an earlier site, terenceallbright.com, to keep it speedy.
Terence Allbright, Composer
Custom-coded
Terence asked for a minimal website that would showcase his compositions. We wrote a custom search and sorted function so that compositions were only ever a couple of clicks away.
Computer literate, but non-technical, Terence asked that we handle all the content updates to the site. This meant we didn’t need to use WordPress, so we designed the code editor and deployed it as a static page. Lightweight, fast and secure.
Custom-coding the website meant we could publish it as a Single Page Application (SPA), which speeds the website up by not reloading shared elements, like the header, when navigating to new pages.
We’ve worked with many more composers and musicians since completing Terry’s site. Our unique understanding of the needs of artistic professionals has made this something of a speciality for us.
Contact us
Leave a message using the form below, or book a no-commitment discovery call with Chris.
Frequently asked questions
- Our services all run on data centres powered entirely by renewable energy, and with a PUE rating of 1.2 or lower. This includes both websites and servers that run internal and client applications.
- The internet is for everyone. Our website are built to meet full accessibility standards. This includes meeting at least WCAG AA compliance for text colour contrast ratios, complete keyboard operability for users with motor impairments, and automatic deactivation of animations for users requesting reduced motion preferences.
- Our websites respect the privacy of your visitors. We don’t ask users to download tracking or advertising cookies when they visit your website. Tracking cookies are often detrimental to the performance of a website, while being invasive to visitors and not being beneficial to your business.
This is where you should lay all your hopes and dreams for your website on the table. We’ll sift through them together and propose a design and a technology stack to realise it.
At the conclusion of the Discovery Phase, after signing our Terms of Business. At this point, we’ll have an agreed deliverable, and have mapped out a timeline for development. Receipt of the first payment – 50% of the agreed amount – kicks off the Development phase.
This depends on the scope of the project, but we’ll agree a timeline in the Discovery phase. As a general rule, any website that can use our Graphite WordPress theme will move quickly, usually taking only a matter of weeks to reach completion.
In fact, our record for going from Discovery to Publication is six days. After the discovery meeting, the website was ready for review less than 48 hours later. After a minor round of edits, the site was rubber stamped and we completed the content management training with the client.
On the flip side, anything that involves a custom integration will be a bottleneck on development. The longest we’ve spent in development is three months, where we had to work with a third-party service provider to build a gateway from the ground up.
We’ll discuss the needs of your website in the Discovery phase, and you’ll be made aware of any time-intensive aspects of the proposal before you sign the Terms of Business.
As little as possible. We’ll only begin the Development phase once the Discovery phase has been signed off by you.
The Development phase is where the main body of work takes place for us, and can involve several sprints to complete the project. Input during this phase will slow down development, so, while we encourage you to stay in touch, we ask that significant edits be saved for the Review stage.
We believe in transparency of the development process, and we give you access to a staging site for that reason during development. The process works best if you make notes as development progresses, then we can begin the Review stage with a complete set of edits that has grown organically.
The Development phase aims to built the website as closely as possible to the agreed deliverable from the Discovery phase. You can monitor progress during the Development phase through the staging site, and check that everything is shaping up the right way.
You can request any changes to the design during the Review stage. A review can be a sweeping redesign, or just a rubber stamping of the product at the end of the Development phase.
Anything related to copy, images, content, layout or design. Features that require additional functionality that weren’t discussed during the Discovery phase incur an additional charge. Everything else is fair game.
This is an important part of our process. Limiting reviews does two things:
- It forces you and us to properly define the scope of the project in the Discover phase, rather than defer it to the review stage.
- It means that once the website has finished development, its publication isn’t delayed by trivial updates. Each review should meaningfully move the project forward.
Yes! Our Terms of Business grant you a perpetual licence to use your site once the Publication phase is complete. If you have a trusted hosting partner, you’re welcome to host it with them.
If you choose to host your published website with us, you’ll get unlimited content edits (subject to our fair use policy).
Any additional features that were not part of the scope agreed in the Discovery phase are not included in this. We can provide a quote for them separately.
No, we don’t host email servers. The reason is singular and simple: getting emails delivered from self-hosted or shared hosting platforms to major providers is a major technical hurdle, and a full-time job.
Not at all!