Building SportSupplements.uk.

The brief was a person, not a document

Marek's pitch to his customers is simple: he takes what he sells, he stocks a deliberately small range from manufacturers he trusts, and if you don't need something he'll tell you not to buy it. The website had one job - be that pitch, in software. Which meant every easy e-commerce trick was off the table from day one: no countdown timers, no perpetual sales, no "only 3 left!" theatre. The honesty is the brand. Break it once in a footer and the whole thing rings false.

So the shop shows the real cost per serving on every price, computed live from the pack size. The product finder asks three questions and will happily end with "you don't need anything yet - eat first, text me if unsure." Every dead end offers Marek's actual phone number rather than a chatbot pretending to be him.

What we refused to build

Supplements are a regulated market, and the supplier catalogues are full of things you cannot lawfully say - or sell - in the UK. Before a single product went live we checked every SKU against the GB nutrition and health claims register, rewrote every description from the label data up, and struck the claims that don't survive contact with UK law. One product never made it onto the site at all, because UK law classes one of its ingredients as a prescription-only medicine. It would have sold. It stayed off.

The same thinking runs through the shop itself: products carrying high doses of vitamin B6 warn you against buying two of them together, on the product page and again at the point of sale. A supplements shop that occasionally talks you out of a purchase is a shop you trust with the purchases it does recommend - and it's exactly what Marek already does in person.

An admin with three buttons

Marek would tell you himself he struggles with computers. The standard WordPress admin - two sidebars, forty menu items, a dashboard full of graphs - was never going to work. So he doesn't see it. His "My Shop" screen has three things: orders to send, prices & stock, and one switch for the site notice. One click marks an order posted. Change a price and the cost-per-serving recalculates everywhere it appears. That's the whole interface, because that's the whole job.

This is the part of the build we'd point any prospective client at. Most website problems aren't technology problems - they're fit problems. Software should be built around the person who has to use it at 9pm after a full day's work, not around what the platform happens to offer.

The details that cost nothing

The dark hero carries a chalk handprint, and around it drift a few hundred dust motes that scatter away from your cursor - hand-written WebGL, raw shaders, no libraries, desktop-only, loaded after the page paints. Lighthouse scores it as if it weren't there: measured live this week, the storefront, product pages and product finder all score 100 for accessibility and 100 for SEO, with zero layout shift. During the build we also cut the mobile render time of the main content from 35.8 seconds on the old imagery pipeline to around 5 - the boring work of WebP images and responsive banners that nobody sees and everybody feels.

It's the same discipline as the Illuminations scene on our own homepage: an effect earns its place or it doesn't ship.

What this means if you're not a supplements shop

Strip the specifics and the recipe travels: understand the person, protect their reputation even when it costs a sale, build the admin around their actual life, and make the flourishes free. Most of our clients need the £29.99-a-month website rather than a full shop - but when you need the shop, this is how we build one. Read the full case study, browse the rest of our work, or tell us what you're selling.