Sometimes you just need your website or subsection of your website to do exactly what you want it to do. You don't want to twist and turn and fight the underlying architecture of an application in an attempt to get it to do what you want, how you want it to.

Wheel reinventing

Back in the beginning, when there was a lot less choice of quality software for websites, most of the websites I created were bespoke programming. Built from the ground up, they fulfilled their remits, worked reliably and were examples of which I was proud. I developed e-commerce, content management and even auction websites.

As things have developed, there comes a point where you can no longer justify reinventing the wheel. So for blogs and general company websites, it’s WordPress. For e-Commerce, it’s Prestashop. With a judicious smattering of plugin magic and theme tweaking, most use cases can be satisfied by one of those two.

Sustainable bespoke web development

For the cases where the off-the-peg no longer cuts it, is too expensive or limited then the answer is to have something specific made for you. The sustainability refers not to environmental aspects but to the use of industry standard recognised tools and frameworks. I characterise myself as a full-stack web developer. Here are some of the technologies and frameworks I currently use:

• Laravel
• Laravel Livewire
• Vite
• Filament PHP
• AlpineJS