Most agency websites are the same template with a different logo. We do not build those.

A Riv Lux site is designed from your actual business — what you sell, who buys it, what they need to believe before they act — and then hand-built in real code. No page builder, no theme, no 4MB of plugin JavaScript loading before anyone sees a word.

What you get

Custom design. Type, colour, motion, and layout chosen for your brand, not inherited from a marketplace theme.
Hand-written front-end. Semantic HTML, modern CSS, no framework tax. Sites that hit Core Web Vitals because they are small, not because they were optimised after the fact.
Content that does a job. We write or rewrite the copy so each page argues for one thing.
Search-ready structure. Server-rendered HTML, structured data, clean URLs, an information architecture where each page targets one intent.
Bilingual, if you need it. English and Spanish, written in both — details here.
A site you can actually update. We hand over something you can run, and we document it.

Why hand-built beats a page builder

Page builders are excellent at getting something live this week. They are bad at three things that matter later:

Weight. A typical builder site ships 2–4MB before first paint. Ours ship under 300KB. That is the difference between passing and failing Core Web Vitals on a phone on a subway.
Ownership. When the platform changes its pricing or deprecates a widget, a builder site is their problem to solve and your problem to pay for.
Ceiling. Anything genuinely custom — a configurator, a real-time visual, an unusual interaction — is where builders stop and we start.

The trade-off is honest: hand-built costs more up front and takes longer. If you need a five-page brochure site live on Friday, a builder is the right call and we will say so.

Proof

Every project in our work is live, and all but one we designed, engineered, and launched end to end — the exception is labelled as a collaboration. Notable ones:

News4You (client) — local journalism with a membership system on a modern stack.
PourPlay (client) — a wine education platform with a 690-bottle catalog and a live game layer.
Cuyar — our own: a bilingual movement app for adults over 65, built as an installable PWA with offline audio coaching.

And this site, which renders 110,000 particles live rather than playing you a video.

How long it takes

A brand site is typically 6–12 weeks from signed brief to launch. The two things that move that number are how ready your content is and how many people have to approve each round.

Projects where the client has copy, photography, and one decision-maker land at the short end. Projects waiting on a photoshoot land at the long end.

What it costs

Brand sites start around $4,500 and most land between $4,500 and $9,000. The full breakdown — including what makes a project cheaper or more expensive — is on the pricing page.

Common questions

Do I need to have my content ready before we start? No, but it is the single biggest thing that determines how fast the project goes. If you do not have copy, we write it — that is a scoped part of the project, not an afterthought.

Who owns the code? You do, on final payment. You get the repository.

Do you host it? We deploy to Vercel or Netlify under your account, so the hosting relationship is yours. We are not a reseller and we do not mark up hosting.

What happens after launch? Thirty days of fixes are included. After that we work on a small monthly retainer or ad hoc — your choice, no lock-in.

Can you make my existing site faster instead of rebuilding it? Sometimes. Performance work on someone else's codebase is quotable but we look first. If the answer is "this needs a rebuild", we will tell you that before you spend money.

Web design and development