Services · Six lines

What we are paid
to do

Six service lines, drawn directly from the three activities the company is registered for. Each can be bought on its own, each is scoped in writing before it starts, and each says below what it does not include — which is usually the more useful half of the description.

01 Build 02 Operate 03 Advise 04 Advertise

01 — SIC 63120

Portal design
& build

The core of the business. A portal is a site people use rather than read: they search it, filter it, submit to it, join it and come back to it. That changes the order of the work — structure and search behaviour are designed before any visual language, because a beautiful directory nobody can search is a failed directory.

We build with boring, well-supported technology chosen for how easy it is to hand over, not for how interesting it is to us. Accessibility is targeted at WCAG 2.2 AA, pages are measured against real device performance rather than a marketing score, and the whole thing lives in a repository that belongs to you from the first commit.

Typically includes
  • Discovery: users, tasks, and the searches the site has to answer
  • Information architecture, URL structure and navigation model
  • Interface design — desktop and mobile, light and dark where relevant
  • Front-end build: responsive, accessible, keyboard-navigable
  • Back end, database and admin: listings, submissions, members, media
  • On-site search, filtering, sorting and pagination that behaves
  • Integrations: payments, email, CRM, mapping, calendars, feeds
  • Structured data, sitemaps, canonical and metadata groundwork
  • Staging environment, migration plan and go-live checklist
Not included unless scoped

Native mobile applications, bespoke machine-learning features, ongoing content writing, stock photography licences, and third-party subscription costs — which are always paid by you, directly, so the price is the price.

02 — SIC 63120

Content
operations

Portals fail slowly, and almost always for the same reason: publishing something new is harder than it should be, so nobody does it. This line exists to make the day-two experience as considered as the launch — the editor's screen designed with the same care as the visitor's.

We model the content properly, write the taxonomy down, set the roles and permissions, and leave you with a short written runbook and a recording of the common tasks. If your team can add a listing, close a submission and publish an article without emailing us, the line has done its job.

Typically includes
  • Content model: entry types, fields, relationships, required media
  • Taxonomy, categories, tags and the rules for adding to them
  • Editorial workflow: draft, review, schedule, publish, expire, archive
  • Roles and permissions for staff, contributors and members
  • Submission and moderation queues, with spam and abuse handling
  • Bulk import, deduplication and clean-up of existing records
  • Search tuning: synonyms, weighting, empty-state and no-result behaviour
  • Written runbook plus short screen recordings for each routine task
Not included unless scoped

Day-to-day content production, moderation staffing, and translation. We can design the workflow and train the people who run it; we do not sit in the queue pretending to be your editorial team.

03 — SIC 63120 / 62020

Hosting, performance
& care

An optional month-to-month arrangement for keeping a portal healthy: updates applied, backups proven, certificates renewed before they expire, and a named person who answers when something is wrong at four in the afternoon on a Friday.

Hosting is bought in your name, on your card, from a provider we recommend on merit — we take no commission and no reseller margin, so we have no reason to put you on the wrong plan. Thirty days' notice ends it, and the handover is included rather than charged for.

Typically includes
  • Hosting selection, provisioning and configuration in your own account
  • TLS certificates, DNS records and domain renewal monitoring
  • Framework, plugin and dependency updates on a stated cadence
  • Off-site backups, with a restore actually tested — not just scheduled
  • Uptime and error monitoring with alerts routed to a real inbox
  • Performance budgets, image and asset discipline, caching review
  • Security hardening, access review and log retention
  • A monthly written note: what changed, what broke, what needs deciding
Honest limits

We are a small company, not a 24/7 network operations centre. Response windows are working hours, stated in the agreement, and we would rather write down a target we can hit than sell you a service level we cannot.

04 — SIC 62020

Technology
consultancy

Sometimes the right answer is not a build. This line is sold on its own, with no expectation that it leads anywhere else: you get a written report, in English, with findings, options, costs and a recommendation you can hand to a board or to another supplier entirely.

Because Tech 52 holds no reseller tier, partner badge or referral arrangement with any vendor, the comparison in that report has no thumb on the scale. "Keep what you have" is a conclusion we are free to reach, and have no reason to avoid.

Typically includes
  • Platform review: hosting, security, dependencies, performance, accessibility
  • Architecture and integration advice for portals and their surrounding systems
  • Build, buy or extend comparisons with costed options and trade-offs
  • Supplier and platform selection, requirement writing, tender support
  • Analytics and measurement design — what to count, and why it matters
  • UK GDPR readiness for a portal: consent, retention, subject requests, processors
  • Migration and consolidation planning, including redirect and content mapping
  • A written report and a walkthrough call with the people who must act on it
To be clear

We are not a law firm and this is not legal advice. On data protection we help you get the technical and record-keeping side in order, and tell you plainly when a question needs a solicitor rather than an engineer.

05 — SIC 73110

Campaign planning
& creative

Advertising work begins with a plan that states, in writing, who we are trying to reach, what we want them to do, and what each pound is supposed to buy. If we cannot answer those three questions convincingly, we say so before you spend anything.

Creative is produced to fit the plan rather than the other way round: the landing page, the message and the ad are designed as one thing, because a good campaign pointed at a bad page is simply a faster way to lose money.

Typically includes
  • Audience definition and the demand that already exists for what you offer
  • Positioning and messaging — what to say, and what to stop saying
  • Channel plan with a budget split and a stated purpose per channel
  • Landing page design and build, matched to the ads that point at it
  • Ad copy, static and motion creative, and the variants worth testing
  • Naming and tracking conventions so results can be attributed later
  • A launch checklist covering consent, tags, forms and thank-you paths
Not included unless scoped

Film production crews, media talent, print and out-of-home buying, PR and influencer contracting. Where those are genuinely needed we help you brief and appoint specialists directly, on your own contracts.

06 — SIC 73110

Paid media
& measurement

Search, social and display buying run inside your advertising accounts, on your payment method, with our access granted as a user you can remove. Media spend never touches our invoices, is never marked up, and earns us no percentage — the fee is fixed against the scope, so the advice to pause a channel costs us nothing.

Measurement is set up before money is spent, not after it disappears. If a conversion cannot be tracked honestly, we say so and report the proxy we are using instead of quietly presenting it as truth.

Typically includes
  • Account structure, campaign build and audience or keyword research
  • Budget pacing, bid strategy and negative/exclusion hygiene
  • Conversion tracking, events and consent-aware analytics configuration
  • Landing page and creative testing on a stated schedule
  • Weekly monitoring, with changes logged so you can see what we did
  • A monthly written report: spend, results, cost per outcome, next actions
  • A quarterly "should this continue?" review, answered honestly
What we will not do

Guarantee rankings, promise a cost per acquisition before we have data, buy traffic from networks we cannot audit, or report on metrics chosen because they flatter us. Impressions are not results.

Commercials

How the money
is arranged

Three ways to buy, all quoted in pounds sterling before work starts, all excluding VAT where it applies, and none of them containing a percentage of your media spend.

A · Fixed project

Priced against a written scope

Builds, migrations and campaign launches. The brief states scope, assumptions, exclusions, milestones and the total. Change requests are quoted before they are carried out, never invoiced afterwards as a surprise.

B · Monthly care

A fixed fee, month to month

Hosting and maintenance, content operations support, or ongoing media management. Rolling monthly, thirty days' notice either way, with the handover pack included rather than charged as an exit fee.

C · Advisory

A day rate or a fixed report

Reviews, second opinions, supplier selection and tender support. Sold as a deliverable you keep, with no obligation to buy anything else from us afterwards — including from us.

Media spend Paid by you, directly to the platform, at cost. Never invoiced by us, never marked up, never commissioned.
Third-party costs Hosting, domains, licences and subscriptions are bought in your name so they survive the relationship.
Ownership Code, designs and content produced for you transfer to you on payment, in writing.
Quotes Valid for 30 days, in pounds sterling, exclusive of VAT where chargeable.

Next

Which of the six do you actually need?

Tell us the problem rather than the solution and we will say which lines apply — up to and including none of them, if that is the honest answer.

support@tech52.org