Ethical, straightforward website development.
Strategic design and layout to drive conversions.
Custom coded to meet your website needs.
User-friendly content management.
Privacy-first websites with no cookie banners.
Fast, sustainable, UK-based hosting.
How we build your website
Our development process is battle-tested to deliver your website to our high standards of quality without any delays. No surprises, minimal effort from you.
Discovery
01
We’ll meet to discuss your website ambitions. This is where you can tell us all the amazing things you want your website to do!
Together, we’ll assess the scale and scope of the project and agree an appropriate timeline. There is no commitment at this stage.
Once everything is agreed, you’ll be asked to sign our Terms of Business, a 50% deposit of the agreed fee is made, and the website enters active development.
Development
02
Work begins on the website. We’ll build the site from top to bottom to the exact specification we agreed in the Discovery phase.
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 and images on the site.
We’ll also discuss options for ongoing website hosting and maintenance.
*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 driven by creativity and quality.
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. I decided that, instead of running down my teaching batteries with dozens of students, I would try and help other small businesses 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!
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.
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.
Contact us
Frequently asked questions
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!