Websites with
craft in the pixels
and a job to do.
Northlight is a six-person design and build studio in Portland, Oregon. We make considered, fast, conversion-minded websites for brands that sweat the details — and measure what happens after launch.
since 2013
conversion rate
us again
On your table Thursday.
Six people, one room,
no handoffs.
We started Northlight in 2013 after too many years watching good strategy get diluted by three agencies and a change order. So we kept it small: the people who scope your project are the same people who design it, build it, and answer the phone in month seven.
We take on roughly fourteen projects a year. That's deliberate. It means your site gets senior attention from kickoff to launch day, and it means we can say honestly that we've never shipped something we wouldn't put our name on.
“No juniors doing the real work while a director drops in once a fortnight.”
— How we describe ourselves in every kickoff
Design & art direction
Type systems, layout, motion, and a component library your team can actually extend without calling us.
Front-end build
Hand-written, accessible markup. Astro, Next, or plain HTML — whichever keeps your site under a second.
Conversion & CRO
Analytics wired properly, a testing plan, and quarterly reviews that change the page, not just the deck.
Brand systems
Identity refreshes, voice guidelines, and photography direction for brands whose site outgrew their logo.
Who you'll actually work with
Everyone below is on your kickoff call and in your Slack channel.
Six projects,
six honest numbers.
Every case below includes the metric the client cared about most. Tap any project for the full story — brief, approach, and what shifted after launch.
No projects in that category yet — try another filter.
A predictable eight weeks, start to launch.
No mystery phases. You'll know what's happening each week, what we need from you, and exactly when you'll see something real in a browser.
Dig in
Stakeholder interviews, analytics audit, competitor teardown. We come back with a one-page strategy you can argue with.
Shape
Content-first wireframes, then two art directions. You pick one; we refine it into a full page system.
Build
Staging link on day one of the sprint. Accessibility, performance budgets, and CMS training baked in, not bolted on.
Launch & tune
We ship, watch the numbers for 30 days, then fix whatever the data says is wrong. That month is included.
“We'd been quoted six figures by two agencies for the same scope. Northlight delivered in eight weeks for a third of it, and our subscription revenue passed wholesale for the first time in November.”
Clear numbers, before the call.
Fixed scope, fixed price, no hourly surprises. Roughly 80% of our work lands in one of these three shapes.
Launch Sprint
For a sharp one-page site or a focused landing system.
- Strategy workshop & copy edit
- Up to 4 unique layouts
- Built, hosted, analytics wired
- 30 days of post-launch tuning
Full Build
The complete site: strategy, design system, CMS, the lot.
- Everything in Launch Sprint
- Up to 14 templates + component library
- CMS setup & team training
- Accessibility audit (WCAG 2.2 AA)
- 90 days of tuning & support
Commerce
Shopify or headless storefronts built to sell, not to sit.
- Everything in Full Build
- Custom theme & checkout flow
- Subscriptions & product data migration
- First A/B test designed & shipped
Care
Keep an existing site fast, patched and gently improving.
- Hosting, backups, uptime monitoring
- Content & small layout changes
- Monthly performance report
Growth
A design and build team on tap, shipping every fortnight.
- Everything in Care
- New pages & campaign landing builds
- Running A/B test programme
- Shared Slack channel, 1-day response
Embedded
We become your web team, roadmap and all.
- Everything in Growth
- Quarterly roadmap & on-site workshop
- Design system ownership
- Same-day response, priority queue
Nonprofits and B-Corps get 15% off project work. Payment plans available over 3–6 months.
The things people ask on the first call.
Something not covered? Ask us directly — we answer every enquiry within one working day.
Send us a noteA Launch Sprint is three weeks. A Full Build is eight. Commerce projects run ten to fourteen depending on how tidy your product data is. We lock dates at contract signing and we've hit them on 64 of our last 68 projects — the four misses were all waiting on client content, which is why we now write copy with you in week two.
Usually both of us. Sam runs a two-hour message workshop, drafts the structure and headlines, and you fill in the parts only you can write — product detail, team bios, the specifics. If you'd rather hand it over entirely, full copywriting adds $4,500 to any project.
We default to Astro with Sanity as the CMS, Shopify for commerce, and Next.js when there's real application logic. We don't build on page-builder plugins, and we won't hand you something only we can maintain. You own the repository from day one.
Often, yes — about a third of our projects are design-and-system only, handed to an internal team to implement. In that case we deliver a Figma library, coded reference components, and two weeks of pairing time so nothing gets lost in translation.
Every project includes 30 to 90 days of tuning: we watch real analytics, fix friction, and ship improvements at no extra cost. After that you can move to a Care or Growth partnership, or simply take the keys and run it yourself. No lock-in, no hosting hostage situation.
Tell us what
you're building.
Fill this in and Nora will reply personally within one working day — usually with two or three questions and a suggested time to talk. No sales sequence, no automated drip.
Portland, Oregon 97202
Brief received, friend.
It's landed in Nora's inbox. You'll get a real reply — not an autoresponder — within one working day, along with a couple of questions and some times to talk.