I built a mate a website — and finally showed her what I do all day.

I'd followed my friend's journey on social media ever since she started Tiny Tails, a home-visit pet-care business based in Ashby. When I went to visit her in June 2026, I asked how it was all going.

Fresh off how well the Serendipity Life project had gone, I'd already done something a bit cheeky before I arrived: I built her a mock website to see what she made of it. No pitch, just “here's a thing, what do you think?”

When I asked how the business was going, one thing stood out: her single most expensive cost was her website management fees. She was on a slow Squarespace site and paying a recurring bill for the privilege — a real drag on a young business where every pound counts.

That made the conversation easy. I showed her the mock-up and mentioned that hosting a site like this can be effectively free. She loved it.

I built her a fast, static site covering her services, pricing and reviews, with a zero-friction way to get in touch (prefilled WhatsApp, phone and email rather than a clunky form). It's quick to load, easy to update, and costs nothing to run.

But it didn't stop at the website. I gave Tiny Tails a fresh branding and theme and then carried it beyond the site — designing posters and producing trailers she could use to advertise on social media, cut in varying formats and aspect ratios for different platforms, all in the new look. So the site, her marketing and her social presence finally tell one consistent story.

Tiny Tails is now live on its own domain at tinytailspetcare.co.uk, migrated cleanly off Squarespace. Her most expensive recurring cost is gone, the site is faster, and she has a matching set of marketing material to keep growing the business.

My favourite part had nothing to do with the code. She jokingly got annoyed that I'd built her something better than her paid site so easily — and when I said, “well, it's what I do for a living,” she admitted she'd never really known what I did as a “software engineer.”

Ten years of building software, and it took a pet-care website to finally make it click for a friend. That was worth more than any Lighthouse score.