Inglewood, Taranaki
About Elijah Short
I build websites for Taranaki businesses, and then I look after them. That second half is most of the job.
One person, start to finish
I work on my own out of Inglewood. There's no team and no office with a receptionist. When you email, I'm the one who reads it. When you ring, I'm the one who answers.
I look after more than eighty sites across Taranaki. Businesses, trusts, clubs, a church and a stadium. Most of the people on that list have been with me for years, which I take as the best review I'm going to get.
The person who designs your site is the person who builds it, hosts it, and picks up the phone in five years when something breaks. There's no account manager in the middle and no handover to a support queue, because there's nobody to hand it over to.
I built my first website in 2015, for Vertical Horizons, a Christian camp here in Taranaki. In 2019 I went full-time, with my dad at Rex Short Computer Services looking over my shoulder. I've built more than ninety sites since.
At a glance
- Building websites since 2015, full-time since 2019
- Based in Inglewood, working across Taranaki
- More than ninety sites built, more than eighty on hosting and support
- Businesses, trusts, clubs, a church and a stadium
- Written and coded by hand, not built in a page builder
- WCAG 2.1 AA on every build, as a standard rather than an extra
- Builds from $2,850 + GST
What I'm like to work with
I'll tell you what I think. If you send me artwork that's going to look wrong on a phone, I'll explain why rather than quietly making the best of it. If you ask for something that won't help, I'll say so, and then I'll build it anyway if you still want it, because it's your business and your call.
I try to explain things in words that mean something. A lot of people have been made to feel stupid by someone in this industry. I'd rather you finished a conversation with me knowing something you didn't before.
I'm also not the fastest person in the world at answering email, and when I'm slow I'll say so rather than pretend otherwise.
What I care about in a website
It has to work on a phone
Not "technically load". Work. Most of the people looking at your site are standing up, holding a phone, on a connection that isn't great.
It has to be readable by everyone
Older people, people reading English as a second language, people on an old handset on rural data. I build every site to WCAG 2.1 AA, which is a written standard, not a feeling. It costs nothing extra and it's the right way round.
It has to be findable
For a Taranaki business, someone typing your trade and your town into Google is most of your traffic. "Plumber Stratford" is worth more to you than "plumber" ever will be. That's the cheapest ranking there is and it gets designed in from the start.
It has to still be there in five years
Which is the hosting and support half of the job, and the reason most of my clients have been with me for a long time. Sites don't usually fail on launch day. They fail quietly, a couple of years later, when nobody is watching them.
Want to talk about a site?
Tell me what the business does and what you need the site to do. That's enough to start with.
42 Tarata Rd, Inglewood 4387. Happy to come to you anywhere in Taranaki.