About
The Better Website is a one-person studio. I design it, I build it, and I'm the one you'll actually talk to.
Who's building this
I'm Adam Hoidahl, a designer/developer who spent years doing ADA compliance and WordPress work before deciding both problems shared the same fix: stop building sites out of software you don't fully control. No page builder, no plugin stack, no dashboard between you and your own content — just markup I write myself, on purpose.
How I build
Every page on this site is hand-coded, and every build I take on is too — no CMS, no templates, no page builders. That includes the motion: this site scrolljacks, on purpose, and does it the way I think it should be done — keyboard-friendly, screen-reader-friendly, and completely normal for anyone who'd rather it not move at all. If any of that sounds interesting, the hand-coded case and accessible scrolljacking posts go into the how and why.
Where this came from
The Better Website started as a WordPress agency site I was done with. The replacement had one job beyond replacing it: the site itself had to be the pitch. The motion came from a CodePen demo I admired and rebuilt from scratch, spread across a real, five-page site instead of one. The full case study has the whole story — what I set out to build, what broke, and what shipped.
Want a site like this one?
Start a conversationNo CMS.
Every page is written by hand in plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — no WordPress, no page builder, no plugin stack. Nothing stands between your content and the code that renders it.
WordPress adds a CMS, a database, and a plugin stack between you and your visitors — more to break, get hacked, or slow down. A hand-coded site skips it. The hand-coded case post has the full reasoning.
Yes. Every hand-coded site ships with a lightweight local content editor — no login, no dashboard, no CMS to learn. Edit the page like a document; changes save straight into your site's real files.
Hand-coded sites carry no CMS overhead, so nothing slows the page down but the page itself — fast loads, high Core Web Vitals scores, a lighter footprint than a typical plugin-heavy WordPress build.
It's actually easier — no CMS core, plugins, or themes to keep updated, no security patches to chase. Fewer dependencies means fewer things that can break on their own.
Yes — design and code both, start to finish. The Better Website is a one-person studio; whoever you talk to about your project is the person who builds it.