I am Lars, a website designer and developer.
I am based in the Wellington region of New Zealand. I build clear websites for service businesses, and provide selected development support to agencies and small teams.
What I bring to a website project.
Not a career history. The parts of my background that actually affect the work you would be paying for.
Websites and digital platforms
Building and maintaining websites, and working inside the platforms and tools that sit behind them. Enough exposure to know which problems are worth solving properly and which are not worth introducing in the first place.
Online business
Running things online rather than only building them. Knowing what it is like to depend on a website commercially changes the decisions you make when building one for someone else.
Technical problem-solving
Working out why something is not behaving, in situations where the documentation does not cover it. Most of the value in a build sits in the awkward twenty percent.
Project coordination
Keeping work moving between people, tracking what is outstanding, and making sure the next decision has actually been made. This is the part that keeps projects from stalling.
Remote collaboration
Working with people across time zones, where clear written communication is not a nice extra but the only thing holding the work together.
Modern development tools
Current tooling, including AI where it removes genuine drudgery from routine tasks. It speeds up the boring parts. It does not make the structural decisions, and it is not what you are paying for.
Structure first, decoration second.
Most websites that are not working are not failing because they look dated. They are failing because nobody decided what should be on them, in what order, and what a visitor was supposed to do next.
So I start with structure. What pages exist, what each one is for, what question it answers, and where it leads. Once that is settled, the design work becomes far more straightforward — and the finished site holds together instead of being a set of pages that happen to share a colour scheme.
I build on real pages rather than static mockups, so you see the actual thing on an actual phone rather than an image of it. It makes feedback more honest and catches the problems that only show up when real content meets a real screen.
And I try to keep things boring where boring is better. A website that is simple to update is a website that stays current.
What I try to hold to in client work.
Stated here so you have something concrete to measure me against.
- Clarity — if I cannot explain a decision plainly, it is probably the wrong decision
- Reliability — doing what I said I would do, on the date I said I would do it
- Honest communication — including when the honest answer is no, or not yet, or that is outside what I do
- Thoughtful structure — the order information appears in matters more than how it is decorated
- Practical problem-solving — the simplest thing that genuinely works, rather than the most impressive-sounding one
- Simplicity — fewer moving parts means fewer things to go wrong after I have handed it over
- Maintainable solutions — you should be able to hand this site to someone else and have them understand it
Based in the Wellington region, working remotely.
I am in the Wellington region, and I work with clients throughout New Zealand and further afield. Almost everything happens over video calls, email and shared links, which suits most projects better than travel does.
If you are local and would rather meet in person for the first conversation, that is easy to arrange. If you are not, it makes no difference to the work — the process is the same either way.
Outside of work.
Most of my spare time goes into running, strength training and being outdoors. It is where I do my clearest thinking, and it is probably why I have so little patience for things that are more complicated than they need to be.