John HiemstraCreativeTailor
Fine websites made-to-measure for your business.
The House Style
I believe that enough "deliberate practice" at any one craft eventually reveals a set of principles that become the foundation of new, intentional, successful and instantly recognizable work - the house style.
The house style takes thousands of reps to evolve: decisions that worked, decisions that didn't, and learning what work endures.
The house style is not one size fits all; it is part of the product you came for, the proven foundation of your successful custom build.
I've put my own 10,000 hours[1] together into a new team of AI agents, trained in the house style I've honed over a lifetime of creative practice. They did the heavy lifting to build Tailor, software for building branded, made-to-measure website, blog and ecommerce experiences for humans and agents alike.
The Three Readers
Tailor made sites acknowledge the three kinds of readers searching the web today.
Hopefully, you've optimized for keyword search engines before, and the user experience of humans who use them to find you.
Tailor works both to set the stage for the third, where savvy potential customers are asking AI agents & LLMs[2] to crunch search engine data, deep research websites, and return their best options.
Just as fine suits are cut and built from proven patterns & practices, then adjusted to each client's unique measurements, Tailor sites start with structures machines can easily read — which turn out to be the same structures that make for a better human experience.
Consider these citations rendered above the fold on a typical Google search page these days.
Why them? Why not you?
What Makes a Tailor site
- Fast everywhere. Not "optimize for mobile later". Fast because there's nothing more important when it comes to digital first impressions.
- Search and answer-engine floor. Structured data composition for non-technical users. Clean markup and structured data build the page, nothing bolted on to same-old patterns.
- Your content, your data, your integrations. Landing pages, media feeds, email lists, blogs, RSS, and e-commerce — whatever your business already runs on — without recurring compatibility issues.
- Extendable by developers of all levels. A. Inline support for custom code snippets and AI protoypes, with Postgres/Python base for custom API and feature development if you're into that..
- No plugin ecosystem or update cycle. Nothing that breaks when you're not working on it.
How does it work?
Fitting
Everything starts with a conversation, no obligation. I look at what you have, you tell me what you want to see happen. Together we consider whether Tailor is the answer, or if another approach might be better.
Project
Initial Tailor builds are flat fee against a clearly defined scope of work. Design, build, content structure, launch. You know the number before we start and it doesn't move unless everyone agrees to change.
Fractional
For businesses that want a regular pair of hands after launch — analytics, strategy, new campaigns, content, features or integrations.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Tailor for?
Tailor is for small businesses somewhere between "our current site is barely worth the upkeep" and "a new custom build will take forever", often flavored with some form of "do we have to use WordPress again?"
Is my website built by AI?
Mostly, yes. After fitting for your brand, I decide what gets built, what serves you best and what "done" means. I also hand write and revise most of the critical copy on your site. Your team then assumes full editorial control of the content. Agents do the rest of the building. Trained with a career worth's of judgment, they are why the work is ready in weeks instead of months, and how even the most tedious tasks and testing get correctly done..
So Tailor is an alternative to WordPress?
Yes. It does the job most small businesses choose WordPress for — pages, posts, media, forms, a site you can update yourself. Tailor just does it without the theming & plugin ecosystems that can make sites slow, fragile to update, dependent on specialized hosting and challenging to extend.
Can I edit my own site, or do I have to call you?
It can be all you. The composition blocks make it easy for non-technical contributors to create well-structured, robust content with ease. For developers, composition blocks & even whole pages support native HTML/SCSS/JS for building custom features 'inline' with pre-defined blocks. It can be us — but it doesn't have to be. Tailor sites are built to be easily extendable by developers proficient in Postgres, Python, FastAPI and React.
What is answer engine optimization, and do I need it?
It's structuring a page so third readers (AI Agents & LLMs) can read it accurately and cite you when it answers a customer's question. You need it for the same reason you needed search optimization in 2010 — that's increasingly how customers make decisions. A page that isn't super clear and legible to machines won't be much in the running for human consideration anymore.