Strategy · Design · Build
River Orbit works with a handful of teams at a time. You get the same two people from the first conversation through to launch week — no handover to a delivery pod you have never met.
Message testing, audience mapping and the narrative your site has to carry.
Editorial layout systems, type scales and components your team can extend.
Hand-written, fast, accessible pages wired into the content system you already pay for.
Content loading, redirects, analytics events and a month of post-launch fixes.
How we work
Most enquiries arrive as “we need a new website”. Often the real job is smaller than that, or it is a positioning problem wearing a design brief. Pick the lane that sounds closest and we will confirm or correct it in the first call.
A short, focused engagement to settle what you sell, to whom, and in what order the story lands. Ends with a written narrative, a page-by-page message map and the copy spine your team or ours can build against.
The full engagement: positioning, a design system sized to your real content, then a hand-built front end. We write the markup ourselves, so pages stay quick, keyboard-friendly and straightforward for your team to edit after we leave.
A standing block of studio days each month for campaign pages, product launches and the design debt that never quite reaches a roadmap. Unused days roll over once, so a quiet month is not a wasted one.
Recent work
Short notes on what the brief was, what we changed, and what the team walked away with. Client names stay private until each project is publicly live.
Three plans, eleven feature rows and no sense of who each tier was for. The sales team was answering the same two questions on every call.
Four partners, four ways of describing the same practice. We ran a positioning sprint before anyone opened a design file.
Every new article needed a developer. The editorial team wanted to publish on a Friday afternoon without filing a ticket.
Process
You will always know which stage we are in and what is needed from you next. Nothing moves forward on a maybe.
A working session on goals, constraints and what has already been tried. We write back a one-page scope with what is in and what is deliberately out.
Message map, page order and the words that carry the argument. Design waits until this is agreed, because redrawing is cheaper than rewriting.
Layouts go straight to code in short review loops. You see real pages in a browser each week rather than static mock-ups.
Content loading, redirect checks, analytics events, then a recorded walkthrough and written notes for whoever maintains the site.
Working together
Projects stall for predictable reasons: unclear decisions, missing content, too many opinions in one room. Here is how we keep that from happening.
Questions
Tell us the range you have rather than asking us to guess it. We shape scope to a number instead of quoting a number for a fixed scope, so a smaller budget usually means fewer pages done properly rather than the same site done thinly. If the range cannot support the outcome you need, we will say so on the first call.
Often, yes — retained studio time exists for exactly that. We agree which files, branches and decisions belong to whom before starting, and we write in whatever conventions your developers already use so nothing needs unpicking later.
We note it, price it as a separate line, and let you decide whether it displaces something already scoped or extends the timeline. Changes are normal; quietly absorbing them until the project runs late is not.
We prefer to build the front end by hand and connect it to whichever content system your team can maintain. If you are already invested in a platform, we work inside it. If you are starting fresh, we recommend the simplest option that matches how often you actually publish.
A live staging link usually appears in the second or third week, depending on the lane. You will see pages in a browser well before final sign-off, because that is where layout problems actually reveal themselves.
A recorded walkthrough, written editing notes for non-technical staff, the component rules, and a month of fixes for anything behaving differently from what we agreed. Ongoing work after that is optional, never assumed.
Start a brief
A few sentences is plenty. We read every enquiry ourselves and reply with either a suggested lane and a next step, or an honest note that we are not the right studio for it.
Prefer to think out loud first? Send the same form with “just exploring” in the brief and we will keep it to one short conversation.