Ethical, straightforward web development.
Custom coded to meet your website needs.
Strategic design and layout to drive conversions.
Fast, sustainable, UK-based hosting.
User-friendly content management.
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.
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 present options for ongoing website hosting and maintenance.
About us
We’re a husband and wife team driven by creativity and quality.
Chris Johnston
Director, Designer, Developer
I come from the cut-throat world of piano teaching. I’ve always loved designing things, and I was always finding excuses to exercise my designing muscles as a piano teacher. The website I designed for my teaching practice brings in more enquiries than I can handle, so rather than run down my teaching batteries, I decided to 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 in 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!)
I named the company Black and White partly as a nod to my background as a pianists, 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 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 have my own creative streak, running my custom doggy crochet business, Milo & Me. If you ever need to find me for a content edit, just follow the trail of wool cuttings to wherever I’m working!
My services come as one of a pair with our dog, Milo, who has been unwittingly designated as the company mascot. Chris loves to love photos of him as placeholders 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, not every website wants to be an Elementor WordPress site!
Thurton Preschool
Strapi back end, custom-coded front-end
Thurton & Ashby St Mary Preschool were seeking a new website. While they felt their existing was a little dated, as a team on non-technical volunteers, their main priority was that the new site should be easy to edit.
We moved them from WordPress Elementor onto Strapi, a modern content-management system designed from the ground-up to be a frictionless editing experience.
Terence Allbright
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.
We’ve worked with several more composers and musicians since completing Terry’s site.
Sophie Robinson Photo
WordPress, Custom 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.
CFMDS
Custom-coded
Chichester Festival for Music, Dance and Speech wanted a website that interacted with their entry management system, Play&Perfom.
Where they previously had to re-type hundreds of data on classes, sections and adjudicators, now their website automatically fetches it from Play&Perform.
The redesign didn’t hurt either!
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.
As little as possible. We’ll only begin the Development phase once the Discovery phase has been signed off by us both.
We encourage you to stay in touch during the Development phase, but please bear in mind that frequent editing requests will slow down development, and should be saved for the Review stage.
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.
Absolutely not!