Small on purpose.

We started building websites in 1994, when a good one meant it loaded before the coffee got cold. Thirty years later the technology is unrecognizable and the job is exactly the same: help a small business explain itself to the people who might walk in the door.

Along the way we watched a lot of Buffalo businesses get burned by the same arrangement. An agency sells a website, hands over a login, and disappears. Two years later the contact form has been silently broken for eight months, the host has doubled the bill, and nobody knows who has the domain. The owner concludes that websites are a scam. They’re not. The way they get sold is.

So Pixel Heist is built the other way around. The same studio designs it, builds it, hosts it, and is still there in year six when the holiday hours need changing. Nothing goes to a subcontractor. Nothing gets handed off. If something on your site is wrong, there is one place to call, and it already knows the site.

A bigger studio would need bigger clients, and bigger clients would push out the bakery on Elmwood. We’d rather take four or five new projects a year, do all of them properly, and keep the maintenance work that most agencies treat as an afterthought. It’s a less impressive business and a much better one to hire.

Sites should be hand-built rather than assembled from a dozen plugins that will outlive their maintainers. They should work on a five-year-old Android phone on a bad connection. They should be usable with a keyboard and a screen reader, because the alternative is turning away customers. And the price should be a number you agreed to, not a surprise at the end.

Buffalo and Western New York, mostly: Elmwood, Hertel, Allentown, Larkinville, the Southtowns, the Northtowns. Being able to walk into the shop and watch how it actually runs makes the website better in ways a video call doesn’t. We take work further afield when the fit is right, but the calendar fills locally first.