Websites you own, built to last
Alligator Design — thirty years of web and interface craft, now deliberately small.
I build, host and maintain calm, fast websites for small businesses, artists and professional associations. On your own domain, in plain language, findable by search engines and AI assistants.
What I offer
Four clear offers
Meetings are optional — most of it works by email or chat.
A new website — from one-pagers to full sites
Together we design a bespoke concept for your online presence, and the building that follows takes days, sometimes weeks, never months.
First year of care included, always. A calm, fast site on your own domain with a light, plugin-free content management system underneath. Your content, well structured, findable, changeable. A website built to be run by you — or looked after by me, whichever you prefer.
Website care — everything included
Hosting, domain name, updates, security, backups, and small changes when you ask (within reason; larger work is agreed first). You never think about your website again — it just works.
A website grows with you. I can train you to add and change the content yourself. For bigger needs I can set up a proper editing environment, tailored to how your team works.
This is how I’ve looked after dbla.nl for a network of lawyers since 2011, and how penelopeturner.com has stayed online since 2007.
Rescue & move
Is your website builder failing, shutting down, or holding your content hostage? I inventory everything you have, clean it up, and move it to an online environment you own. I’ve done this at every scale — from small websites to the content of entire government databases.
Website review
I read your website the way a visitor, a search engine and an AI assistant read it. Two weeks later you receive a written report: what works, what doesn’t, and a prioritised list of fixes — in plain language, not jargon. Do the fixes yourself, or have me do them.
Why so simple? My overhead is a garden, not an office. I build on self-hosted, open-source WordPress and host with OVH, a European provider I have worked with for decades — and I keep everything deliberately simple. Simple is also what makes websites last.
For teams and organisations
An outside eye, in writing
Expert review
Your website, product or service, reviewed by an outside eye with thirty years of experience in usability, information architecture and interface design. You receive a written report: findings, reasons, prioritised fixes. Scope agreed on inventory.
Sparring
A standing outside eye for your in-house design or web team. One session (video call or written exchange), whenever you’re stuck, deciding, or about to spend real money. No embedded consulting, no meetings marathon — judgment, on demand.
Workshops & lectures
Information architecture, usability, service design, interface design, writing for the web. I taught these as a guest lecturer at universities; I’ll teach them to your team, in plain language.
One warning before you book me: I am short, direct and eye-opening. You’ll hear what your team already suspects but can’t say out loud — in writing, with the reasons and the fixes attached. I’m hard on the work, never on the people.
Why your own website?
Rent the reach, own the home
A social platform is a locked room. What you carry in — your words, your photographs, your videos, the work of years — remains yours on paper. In practice it sits in someone else’s building, under someone else’s rules. Posts vanish down the feed in two days, most of your followers never see them, and what you can export comes back as a heap of files rather than a body of work. A closed database that holds on to what you make and decides who gets to see it is a great many things, but social is not one of them.
Meanwhile, the people looking for you ask search engines — and increasingly AI assistants, which draw their answers from the open web and cite their sources. A well-structured website on your own domain is what gets found and cited. That’s not a trend; it’s the oldest advice on the web, newly true again. One of my clients has been publishing on her own domain since 2007 — every post still there, at the same address, while the platforms of that era came and went. It’s the only kind of website I build.
Not an AI. Just a man with muddy boots.
The person behind the alligator
I’ve worked on the web for thirty years. I started as a technical writer — software manuals, online help systems — which is why everything I build begins with words and structure, not decoration. I quickly moved into interface and web design, built websites on content management systems since the earliest ones — Movable Type, anyone? In time the projects got bigger: content migrations for large government organisations, moving the unstructured content of ageing databases into a single, well-structured CMS.
From 2010 to 2014 I designed the user interface of Kapaza, then one of Belgium’s largest online marketplaces, where thousands of Belgians bought and sold. The design outlived my tenure: Kapaza ran on it, unchanged, until the day the site closed in 2017 — and when that day came, users flooded social media with complaints. That, I learned, is what a well-designed product earns: people who miss it.
I also reviewed websites for usability and taught information architecture, usability and interface design as a guest lecturer at universities.
In 2021 I burned out, left the screen, and started a garden in the countryside — plants, animals and weather are guiding me now. It was the best design decision I ever made. These days I work at the computer only a couple of hours a day, and I spend them only on work I can do well: a small number of clients, looked after properly, for years. I am more active during cold rainy days and during hot summer afternoons.
That’s not a limitation. It’s the offer.
One more thing. Everything I’ve made lives here now, on a domain I own, at addresses that won’t disappear. It’s the same advice I give my clients: rent the reach if you must, but own your home. If you want to contact me, email works — like it has since 1995.
PORTFOLIO
Selected work
I measure websites in decades, not launches.
Dutch Business Lawyers Abroad
Website, hosting and care for a network of fifteen lawyers, since 2011.
Penelope Turner
Webblog for a singer and composer, built in 2007. She has run it herself ever since — still publishing today, with every post since the first one intact at its own address.
Earlier work
Kapaza.be — 2010–2014 · I designed the user interface for one of Belgium’s largest classifieds sites, the online marketplace Kapaza, used by thousands to buy and sell. The design ran unchanged until the site closed in 2017 and its domain passed to a larger group. Kapaza no longer exists.
European Commission · Content inventory and migration: I inventoried and cleaned several databases and moved content feeding dozens of websites between CMS systems such as Drupal, WordPress, Documentum, Joomla and Carrd.
Contact
Propose a project
I take on only the work I enjoy and can look after properly — and I say so when my hands are full. Tell me about your project in an email; I reply within a few days.
Alligator Design is Geert Valère Allegaert, working from a garden in the countryside. Slow by design, thorough by nature.