An MTV award, a cash prize and a blank slate
Marcus Butler signed with us in October 2017. He had just won an MTV award for vlogging, and the prize money went into building the thing most creators never get round to — an online presence he actually owned.
He found us because we were ranking number one in London for web design at the time. That is worth saying plainly: the work we do on our own search presence is the same work we do for clients, and it is what brought this project through the door.
The brief was the whole footprint. Not a website bolted onto an existing brand, but the brand itself — the logo and identity, the website, the blog and the hosting to run it. He stayed with us for around two years, and over that period his audience grew from roughly 100,000 followers to four and a half million.
We did not create that growth. He did, with the work he made. What we built were the platforms that allowed an audience of that size to be captured, held and turned into something he owned rather than rented from a platform.
Four routes, then the one that shipped
Four genuinely different design directions were produced before settling on the final. Not three variations of the same layout with the buttons moved — four separate answers to the same brief, so the decision was a real one.
The blog
A separate publishing platform alongside the main site, built to carry long-form posts to a very large audience.
The logo
Identity work produced in-house alongside the build, so the brand was consistent across the website, the blog and everything after.
The first post took the server down
The site and the blog launched, and Marcus published his first post. Within a short time the server had fallen over — over a million people had arrived at the same address at the same time.
That is a failure worth describing honestly, because it is the single most useful lesson in this case study. Standard hosting is provisioned for normal traffic patterns: a steady trickle, the odd busy afternoon. It is not provisioned for one person telling several million followers to visit a URL simultaneously.
We moved the site onto a dedicated server with proper caching, and it held. Any creator, publisher or business expecting sudden concentrated traffic — a product launch, a television appearance, a viral post — needs that infrastructure in place beforehand rather than discovering the limit the hard way. It is why we host what we build rather than leaving it to whoever is cheapest.
Why creators need something they own
Every platform a creator builds on is rented. Algorithms change, reach collapses without warning, accounts get suspended by mistake, and an audience of millions can become unreachable overnight through no fault of the person who built it.
A website with a mailing list behind it is the only audience anyone genuinely owns. It is also where brands, press and commercial partners look when they are deciding whether someone is worth working with — and a proper site with the work, the story and a real contact route does more for that than any follower count.
The same logic applies to businesses, which is why we build the same way for a musician as for a creator: own the platform, own the audience, and do not depend on somebody else’s algorithm for your livelihood.
Project development work carried out
Logo & Brand Identity
The identity produced alongside the website rather than bought in separately, so the brand was consistent across the site, the blog and everything that followed.
Website & Blog
Two connected builds — the main site presenting the work and the commercial story, and a separate blog platform for publishing.
Dedicated Hosting
Moved to a dedicated server with proper caching after the first post drew over a million visitors and took standard hosting down.
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