Websites you own, built to last
Alligator Design — thirty years of web and interface craft, made simple for you.
I build, host and maintain websites for small businesses, artists and professional associations.
Your own domain and your own content on a website light enough to stay fast for years — findable by people, by search engines and by AI assistants.
What I offer
Four clear offers
Most of it works by email or chat — meetings are optional.
A new website — from one-pagers to full sites
Together we design a bespoke concept for your online presence, and I have it standing in days, sometimes weeks, never months.
Your content will be well structured, findable, changeable. A website built to be run by you — or looked after by me, whichever you prefer. The first year of care is included, always.
That is how valemioto.com and paintedpoems.world went online this year, with more on the way.
Between 2010 en 2014, I designed the interface of Kapaza, then one of Belgium’s largest marketplaces. It ran unchanged until the site closed in 2017, and people complained on social media about losing it — about the best review a design can get.
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 — nothing lost, nothing left behind, and the keys in your name.
I’ve done this at every scale — from a single page to the content behind hundreds of sites.
That is what I did for organisations large and small: tailor content management systems such as Documentum, Drupal and WordPress to their specific needs; move content out of ageing databases; build component libraries to keep it all going.
It is also how I streamlined the back office of kañooh (now Paddle), the shared website platform of the Flemish government: twelve near-identical screens users kept switching between, brought back to five they could easily recognise.
An outside review
Whenever you are stuck, facing a decision, or about to spend real money, I am available for an outside eye, in the form of a written exchange or a video call. No embedded consulting, no marathon of meetings — judgement, on demand.
I go through your website, platform or interface the way a visitor does, with over thirty years of experience behind me. You get what works, what doesn’t, and a prioritised list of fixes, in plain language, not jargon, within two weeks.
Do the fixes yourself, or have me do them.
One warning before you book me: I am short, direct and eye-opening. You’ll hear what you or your team already suspect but cannot say out loud, in writing, with the reasons and the fixes attached. I am hard on the work, never on the people.
Why so simple? My overhead is a garden, not an office. I build on self-hosted, open-source WordPress and host with OVHcloud, a European provider I have worked with for decades — and I keep everything deliberately simple. Simple is also what makes websites last.
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.
Your own web address, your own keys — and nobody can change the lock
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.
The keys are yours, not mine. If you stop working with me, you lose nothing but me.
Not an AI. Just a man with muddy boots.
The person behind the alligator
I started my career in the early nineties as a technical writer — writing software manuals, creating online help systems — which is why everything I build begins with words and structure, not decoration. Lured by Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s promise of an open web — that anyone could publish, that anyone could link, and that nobody had to ask permission — slowly but steadily I moved into interface design and web development. I’ve built websites on content management systems ever since — Movable Type, anyone?
Decentralization is another important design feature. You do not have to get approval from any central authority to add a page or make a link.
Tim Berners-Lee, Long Live the Web, 2010
In those years I worked on a long run of websites and web platforms — childfocus.be, smals.be, paddle.be, europa.eu and ec.europa.eu among them — as interface designer, content manager, information architect, or simply the one who was asked about usability. It was also the period of conferences and being part of the international information architecture and UX community — small, argumentative, generous. Much of what I know I owe to the people I met and collaborated with during this period rather than to any project.
I also reviewed websites for usability and taught information architecture, usability and interface design as a guest lecturer at several universities.
In 2021 I burned out, left the screen, and started a garden in the countryside — plants, animals and weather set the pace. 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.
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 since 2011. For a network of fifteen Dutch lawyers in fourteen countries, each with their own profile and a page for their country, on one site they never had to move.
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.
Sol Lua Estrela
Website for a small guesthouse in central Portugal. Two rooms, the prices and the house rules on a single page, and bookings go straight to the owner by mail or WhatsApp, with no platform in between. This is a first version. A more elaborated version later this year.
Vale Mioto
Website for a quinta and retreat centre built on an old watermill on the Rio Alva in Portugal. Retreats are ordinary posts with a date, so the owners can manage and add new retreats that move dynamically from Upcoming to Past.
Painted Poems
Website for a friend, poet and painter, live since September 2026. Poems in Dutch, French and English, each marked in its own language, beside his paintings from early to recent. Jan adds new work himself.
RobinAmanda
Website for Robin Amanda, a multidisciplinary practitioner and artist.
Contact
Propose a project
I take on only 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.
