The work between the work
Process can be standardised. Judgement cannot. I’ve spent most of my career around client and project management, both in-house and agency-side, and lately I’ve been noticing how much of doing it well comes down to knowing when a process needs to change. Timelines, budgets and resources still...
Choosing the right tech stack
Here at ON, we intentionally cast a wide net on the technologies that we work with. Across websites, web apps, native apps, installations, and platforms, we don’t tie ourselves to just one, because we recognise that there’s no such thing as “best”, but rather matching the right choices to the...
Startups are prototypes
A startup isn’t just an early-stage company. It’s a mechanism to reduce uncertainty. Every early customer, product release and funding round exists to answer one question: have we learned enough to justify the next investment? A startup is essentially a super complex prototype designed to validate...
The theme is the guardrail
WordPress can now describe itself to machines. WordPress 7.0 landed back in May with AI infrastructure in core. There’s an AI Client, a Connectors screen where the provider keys live, and the Abilities API, which actually arrived back in 6.9. Abilities are how core, plugins and themes describe what...
Cache Components: the right content at the right time
Cast your mind back to the earlier days of the world wide web. A website was essentially a digital document, the web a library, and the internet the mechanism of delivery. Updating a document meant editing HTML on your computer and uploading it to a server by hand, usually over FTP. In 1995 PHP...
We build by leaving things out
Most of what makes a WordPress site good is what we choose to leave out of it. WordPress runs a large part of the web on a big promise: whatever you need, there’s a plugin for it. That promise is one of its greatest appeals, and its most costly trap. Almost everything that harms a WordPress site...
Security deep dive
Security questionnaires now arrive before, during and after the pitch. Your website needs to answer the questions buyers and machines already ask. A few weeks ago I wrote about your website being your biggest asset in an RFP. That piece ended on the unglamorous tier: security posture,...
Shapeshifting the Future
Every year we open our doors for a week to a student trying to find their way into the industry. Not work experience in the shadowing-only sense but a real placement, with a real brief. We do the same for a roomful of UCL students, in the studio for an afternoon. From the outside, a career in this...
Your biggest asset in an RFP, your website
Your biggest asset in an RFP, your website. I’ve spent most of my career in B2B, and at Made by ON I spend my weeks talking to leaders of the world’s most exciting B2B businesses. Lately those conversations keep circling one question, which I put to our strategists and UX team: what happens when...
From static frames to a creative operating system
Looking beyond the flashy generative UI, shader effects and animation features at Figma Config signaled a deeper, more structural shift: the transition from a static repository of files and rules into a behavioural operating system. I left San Francisco with a camera roll of screenshots and pages...