One person, doing the work

I am Sean. I started Palm Projects in 2016, but I have been building websites since 1996, which means I have watched this industry reinvent itself about five times and I have been paid to keep up with every one of them.

That length of experience buys something specific, and it is not nostalgia. It is pattern recognition. Every few years a shortcut appears that works brilliantly for eighteen months and then gets people penalized. I have seen enough of those cycles to tell the difference between a tactic that is early and a tactic that is doomed, which is the single most expensive judgment call in this business.

I have also worked across the full range of budget. Programs running a few hundred dollars a month, and programs with six figures a month behind them. The discipline is identical at both ends. What changes is how much a mistake costs, and how quickly you find out.

Palm Projects is one senior person doing the work. When you hire an agency, the person who sells you the project is usually not the person who builds it, and the person who builds it is usually not the person you can reach when something breaks. Here those are all the same person, and the practical difference shows up on the third phone call rather than the first.

My background is technical rather than in advertising. I spent time at Apple before this, which is where I learned that the details nobody consciously notices are the ones that decide whether something feels good to use. I read the code on every site I take on. When I tell you your site is slow because of a specific plugin, it is because I went and looked.

Outside of this I fly, and I work in aviation and automotive. That matters here for one reason: I have spent years around industries where things get inspected, measured and signed off rather than described optimistically. It is why this site publishes its own performance numbers instead of claiming to be fast.

Palm Projects is deliberately small. I take on a limited number of clients at a time, because the alternative is hiring people to do the work I said I would do. If I am at capacity when you get in touch I will tell you that rather than take the project and stretch it.