About

Small on purpose

40Second is a small studio. We build websites and web software for local and small businesses, we host what we build, and we stay on to keep it working. Our other half is research in AI and data science, which is not a line on a brochure here: it is the reason we understood what machine-readable websites were for before it was a headline.

Small has consequences you can feel. You talk to the person writing the code. There is no account manager relaying your question to someone you never meet, and no junior quietly assigned to your project after the pitch.

It also means we take on a limited number of projects at once. If we are full, we will say so instead of taking the deposit and starting late.

Why hand-built

Most small-business sites are assembled from a theme and a stack of plugins. It is quick, and it works, until the day one plugin updates and the site goes down, or the page takes eight seconds to load on a phone, or nobody can explain why the contact form stopped sending.

We write the site instead. Fewer moving parts, nothing that can update itself into a failure at two in the morning, and pages that load in well under a second because there is almost nothing in them that does not need to be there. That also makes them cheap to host and easy for search engines and AI tools to read, which is the same thing said twice.

Five steps, no surprises

1. Ι

   A conversation, freeWhat the business does, who walks in the door, and what the site has to accomplish. If we are not the right people for it, we say so here rather than three weeks in.

2. ΙΙ

   A fixed quote in writingScope and price agreed before anything begins. Not an hourly estimate that grows. If you later want something outside that scope, we price it separately and you decide.

3. ΙΙΙ

   Design and buildYou see it as it comes together, on a real address you can open on your phone, not as a flat picture in a slide deck.

4. ΙV

   Going liveWe handle the deployment, HTTPS, and the domain changeover. Where a domain also carries the company email, we change only the website records so nobody loses mail. This is the step that goes wrong most often elsewhere, and it is the step we are most careful with.

5. V

   AfterHosting, backups, updates, new pages as the business changes. You email a person, and that person replies.

A one-time job runs the same way but shorter: check, fixed quote, work, proof, done in one to two weeks.

Worth saying out loud

We won’t promise you a ranking. Nobody controls Google’s results or what an AI assistant decides to say, and anyone who guarantees either is selling you something they cannot deliver. We promise the work: a site built so that when the machines look, everything they need is there.

We won’t hold your business hostage. Your domain stays in your name and your content is yours. If you ever want to take the site somewhere else, we hand it over. That is a bad retention strategy and a good way to be worth keeping.

We won’t sell you a monthly plan you don’t need. Plenty of small businesses need a site built once and touched twice a year. If that is you, pay once and call us when something changes.

We won’t quote before we understand it. A number invented on a first phone call is either padded to be safe or wrong, and you pay for it either way.

We won’t make up numbers. No invented statistics, no borrowed case-study figures, no percentages we cannot show you the source of. If we tell you something worked, we will show you how we know.