# The Better Website > A scroll-driven, hand-coded portfolio and web design studio — not built on > a CMS, a page builder or a plugin stack. The Better Website (thebetterwebsite.com) is a static, hand-coded site built by a one-person studio in Raleigh, North Carolina (the Triangle). The site is its own demo: pages scroll normally while their motion is driven by scroll position, and moving between its real pages is animated with the View Transitions API so the whole site reads as one continuous experience. It is written to be quoted: every answer is a self-contained sentence, entities and FAQs are marked up as structured data, and every word is present in the HTML without JavaScript, so a search crawler, an answer engine and a generative model all read the same page a person does. A slide-deck experience, where each section is one screen and one gesture advances one section, is a mode a visitor can switch on; scroll-driven flow is what everyone gets unless they choose otherwise. Its portfolio sells premium hand-coded themes built the same way. The blog covers scrolljacking, the View Transitions API, accessibility, and building websites that aren't built on a CMS. ## Site - [Home](https://thebetterwebsite.com/): Custom websites hand-coded in Raleigh, NC — fast, secure and yours, with premium themes for sale. The scroll-driven site itself is the demo. - [Web Development](https://thebetterwebsite.com/web-development/): How the studio builds: the tooling never ships, so the server holds only the finished page — fast because nothing extra loads, secure because nothing is running to attack, and the page publishes its own near-perfect PageSpeed scores. - [Scrolljacking](https://thebetterwebsite.com/scrolljacking/): Scrolljacking is when a site overrides your scroll to drive its own animation. What it actually is, the four risks worth taking seriously, six rules for using it responsibly, and where it genuinely earns its place. - [Hand-Coded Website Development](https://thebetterwebsite.com/hand-coded/): Hand-coded website development, also called custom-coded or bespoke: every build starts as an empty file and nothing goes in that the project hasn't earned, from a five-file brochure site up to a full application. Where a build starts, the five rungs it can climb (structure, behavior, server, data, application), what a custom-coded site buys you, and the honest limits. - [Websites for Architecture Firms](https://thebetterwebsite.com/architecture-firm-websites/): Hand-coded websites for architecture practices — every project on its own URL, photography that stays sharp without slowing the page, and scroll-driven pacing you control instead of a template grid. - [Minimalist Website Design](https://thebetterwebsite.com/minimalist-website-design/): Minimalist website design is the practice of removing everything from a page that isn't doing a job, so content, typography and space carry the experience. What it actually is, why minimalist sites are fast, how to build depth out of one flat grey, and where it's the wrong call. The page is the Paper theme shown fitted — its own type, its own single accent colour, and two scroll-locked runways. - [Haunted Attraction Websites](https://thebetterwebsite.com/haunted-attraction-websites/): Hand-coded websites for haunted attractions, haunted houses, haunted trails and scream parks — where the site is the first room of the experience. Why a fully scroll-driven advertisement is the right call for an experience business and the wrong one almost everywhere else, what a haunt site has to answer (dates, intensity and age guidance, access and content warnings, parking, groups, casting), and the six-week season that makes speed on a phone decisive. The page is the live demo of the Theirs theme. - [Landscape Architect Websites](https://thebetterwebsite.com/landscape-architect-websites/): Hand-coded websites for landscape architecture practices — photography served at the size it was shot, project pages built to be revisited as planting matures, and copy that separates a design practice from lawn care and maintenance companies in search. Includes what such a site has to do, how to show work that isn't finished yet, and a scroll-locked diagram in which a planting plan is drawn over real ground and the specimen shrubs grow out to meet their dashed maturity circles. The page is the live demo of the Long View theme. - [Luxury Website Design](https://thebetterwebsite.com/luxury-website-design/): Luxury website design is composing a website as a single piece, where the space, the colour, the type, the layout and every movement are chosen for one another rather than assembled from parts. It uses restraint everywhere: nothing reaches the page that has not earned its place, and none of the result is bought at the cost of being found, being read, or being usable by everyone. Covers what composing a page involves (space, colour, layout and movement written for the content rather than taken from a library), why so many premium brands end up with the same website, whose work it suits, and what such a build costs to commission. The page is the live demo of the Vanguard theme. - [Portfolio](https://thebetterwebsite.com/portfolio/): Premium hand-coded themes for sale — real, working scroll-driven builds you can see live and license for your own site. - [Contact](https://thebetterwebsite.com/contact/): Want a website that moves like this one? Schedule a call or send a message — hand-coded, scroll-driven builds for any kind of project. - [About](https://thebetterwebsite.com/about/): A one-person web design studio in Raleigh, North Carolina, serving the Triangle and clients nationwide: what we do, how a build actually runs, who you are working with, and the story behind the site. - [FAQ](https://thebetterwebsite.com/faq/): Answers about hand-coded websites, scrolljacking, accessible motion, pricing, and theme ownership — straight from the one-person studio that builds The Better Website. ## Blog - [Blog index](https://thebetterwebsite.com/blog/): Notes on scrolljacking, the View Transitions API, web accessibility, and hand-coding websites that aren't built on a CMS. - [How Do I Get My Website Into AI Answers?](https://thebetterwebsite.com/blog/how-to-get-your-website-into-ai-answers/): Not with an llms.txt file. As of August 2026 no major AI company has committed to reading one, and Google's search relations people have publicly compared it to the old keywords meta tag; a tidy list of your pages cannot make those pages worth quoting. What an answer engine reads is the HTML your server hands over before a single line of your JavaScript has run, so the job is being the clearest source of a specific answer, in plain text, on a real URL. How to check your own site in a minute by viewing source and searching it for a sentence you can see on screen, why a model quotes a self-contained sentence rather than a page, writing headings as the question people type and answering it in the very next sentence, structured data as a label rather than a lever, and the unglamorous half: be fast, give everything a real URL, be mentioned somewhere that is not your own site, and be right in public about something narrow. Includes the honest caveat that no tool yet measures how often a model cites you, and the argument that every item on the list is good practice regardless. - [How Do I Make My Website Faster?](https://thebetterwebsite.com/blog/how-to-make-your-website-faster/): Websites do not go slow through one big mistake, they go slow one reasonable request at a time, so the fix is a rule rather than a tool. Measure in PageSpeed Insights on mobile, size images properly and lazy load everything except the one at the top, stop fetching fonts, widgets, maps and tags from other people's servers, and turn on compression and long caching. The most common failure is volume rather than technique: a proud business wanting a photo of every job it has done, where lazy loading defers the download but not the scrolling, so 143 before-and-after shots become the whole website on a phone and the visitor leaves before reaching any call to action. Pick eight or ten featured projects, cycle them, replace rather than append. The caveat: 534 five star reviews genuinely are credibility, so show the number and the best few, lazy load the rest of the carousel where that text is not needed by search engines or AI assistants, and put the pile behind a view all link on a page built as an archive. Every site is judged case by case against its own market and goals. Then how this site does it: self-hosted subset fonts (dropping two Google Fonts stylesheets removed close to 1.8 seconds of render-blocking work), no framework, jQuery, animation library or icon font, and 33 KB of CSS with 18 KB of JavaScript. Lab result, PageSpeed Insights, August 2026: 100 performance on desktop, 97 to 100 on mobile, 100 for accessibility, best practices and SEO. - [Is Scrolljacking Bad for User Experience?](https://thebetterwebsite.com/blog/is-scrolljacking-bad-for-user-experience/): Yes, mostly, and the research is right about that. But scrolljacking is a brand decision rather than a technical one. It usually earns its place with luxury, architecture and design, technology and software, and experience brands, whose customers arrive already convinced and are not shopping on comfort, and almost never with a library, a bank or an archive, where the visitor came to look something up. Crucially, an industry list is a starting point rather than a verdict: two firms in the same sector can need opposite websites, so it is judged brand by brand and audience by audience as a conscious decision on every project. Also the two questions to ask before shipping it, and why a bold brand still does not get to break keyboard access or ignore reduced motion. - [What Is Scrolljacking?](https://thebetterwebsite.com/blog/what-is-scrolljacking/): Scrolljacking is when a site takes over your scroll instead of letting the browser handle it. What it is, why it earned a bad name, and why the View Transitions API is bringing it back. - [Does Scrolljacking Hurt SEO?](https://thebetterwebsite.com/blog/scrolljacking-seo/): One URL, invisible content, heavy scripts — the classic scrolljacked site earns its bad rankings. But Google has no scrolljacking penalty. What actually hurts SEO, and the architecture that fixes it. - [Is Scrolljacking Bad for Accessibility?](https://thebetterwebsite.com/blog/is-scrolljacking-bad-for-accessibility/): No, the technique is not the problem: four specific build decisions are, and every one of them is optional. Nothing in WCAG prohibits a page that moves; 2.3.3 asks only that the motion can be turned off. How a scrolljacked build actually breaks keyboard access, reduced motion, focus order and the back button, which WCAG criteria an ADA review would reach for, and the four answers that fix them. - [The View Transitions API in Practice](https://thebetterwebsite.com/blog/view-transitions-api/): Cross-document view transitions let the browser animate between real pages — no SPA framework, no client router. What shipping the View Transitions API on a live site taught me. - [Building a Scroll-Driven Website: A Case Study](https://thebetterwebsite.com/blog/building-a-scroll-driven-website/): From a CodePen animation to a multi-page site that scrolls like one continuous experience — the full case study of building this scroll-driven website. - [What I've Learned Building a Scrolljacking Website](https://thebetterwebsite.com/blog/what-i-learned-building-a-scrolljacking-website/): The follow-up to the case study, three weeks on. Scrolljacking is an amplifier rather than a feature: it multiplies whatever the site already is, so a slow or disjointed site gets worse. Why it earned its reputation, the rules that answer each complaint, and what came back out — the slide deck was broken on purpose to get flow in place and has since been rebuilt as a selectable experience, several overlapping animations were cut because even a hand-coded site has a frame budget, and automatic page advance in flow is still undecided. Also: the brand has to suit it, and the site is built for the audience rather than the client or the developer. - [How Fast Can a New Website Rank? Ours Took a Week.](https://thebetterwebsite.com/blog/how-fast-can-a-new-website-rank/): A brand-new, unfinished website hit page one for its target keyword in seven days. The real Search Console numbers, and the strategy behind them: pick a fight you can win. - [Hand-Coded Websites vs WordPress: The Case for a Blank File](https://thebetterwebsite.com/blog/hand-coded-websites/): Hand-coded websites versus WordPress, from a developer who built WordPress sites for years. What a CMS actually is and what it costs in speed and security, why a "hand-coded WordPress site" is still mostly code nobody on the project wrote (core, plugins, jQuery; the custom theme is the thinnest layer), and the honest answer to "but how do you edit it?" - [Why Website Accessibility Matters](https://thebetterwebsite.com/blog/why-website-accessibility-matters/): The introduction — why accessibility matters beyond the legal angle, what ADA compliance actually asks for, and what the studio learned building a site for people with visual impairments alongside a man who is legally blind (what slowed him down was developers leaving things unnamed). Names the two offenders anyone can check without a developer: text below the 4.5:1 contrast threshold, and form fields whose placeholder is doing the label's job. - [Website Accessibility Basics: The Nav and Your Images](https://thebetterwebsite.com/blog/website-accessibility-basics/): The two things that break first on almost every site — a navigation you can't operate without a mouse, and images whose alt text is missing, wrong, or describing the wrong thing. A developer's starting point: what a keyboard-operable menu owes the user, why a linked image's alt text names the destination rather than the picture, the difference between an empty alt and a missing one, and the WCAG criterion each failure sits at (nearly all Level A). Also how this relates to ADA compliance, and how to test a site with no budget and no vendor. - [AI. Am I Worried?](https://thebetterwebsite.com/blog/the-ai-revolution/): Will AI take over developer jobs? There's no simple answer here. Should you be worried? I'm not. Here's why. - [The AI Revolution, Revisited](https://thebetterwebsite.com/blog/the-ai-revolution-revisited/): In 2024 I asked whether AI would take my web development job. Two years later: it didn't — it made me a powerhouse. On AI-built websites and using the tool right. ## Themes - [Vanguard](https://thebetterwebsite.com/luxury-website-design/): A dark theme. Obsidian, one bronze and Roman capitals, where every section is a frame that a stage moves through and scroll position is the camera: a viewfinder that comes forward out of depth, panels that glide past a held column, and a spec sheet that opens like a set of louvers. Built for luxury and premium brands whose work is a story or a statement; the live demo is the luxury website design page itself. - [Daylight Study](https://thebetterwebsite.com/architecture-firm-websites/): Drawing sheets pinned to a wall where scroll position is the time of day — the wall shifts colour and every shadow swings with the sun. Built for architecture and design practices; the live demo is the architecture firm page itself. - [Theirs](https://thebetterwebsite.com/haunted-attraction-websites/): A horror theme. A rain-lashed door opens onto something waiting in the dark, the screen whites out into a bright blue sky, and the sky turns out to be a grave you are being lowered into. Built for haunted attractions and experience businesses; the live demo is the haunted attraction page itself. - [Long View](https://thebetterwebsite.com/landscape-architect-websites/): A drafting theme. One warm vellum, one ink, hairline rules and drawn lettering, with no colour anywhere on the page except inside the photographs. Its centrepiece is a scroll-locked diagram where scroll position is twenty years of elapsed time. Built for landscape architects and design practices whose work matures after it is installed; the live demo is the landscape architect page itself. - [Dive Bar](https://thebetterwebsite.com/portfolio/themes/dive-bar/): A rainy, neon-lit theme for bars and restaurants, hand-coded from scratch. See it live and license it for your own site. - [Paper](https://thebetterwebsite.com/portfolio/themes/paper/): A neumorphic, soft-UI theme built from shadow and gradient alone, with no borders and no color doing the work, hand-coded from scratch for studios, agencies and portfolios. This page is the theme unfitted; the same theme fitted into a full site is the minimalist website design page. - [Vitrea](https://thebetterwebsite.com/portfolio/themes/vitrea/): A liquid-glass theme with an animated light/dark toggle, hand-coded from scratch. See it live and license it for your own site. - [Silver Plate](https://thebetterwebsite.com/portfolio/themes/silver-plate/): Realistic 3D silver type under a light source that follows your cursor. Built for and purchased by Silver Plate Buyers. - [Record Shelf](https://thebetterwebsite.com/portfolio/themes/record-shelf/): A crate-digging theme for record shops, portfolios, and product catalogs: visitors browse your collection like vinyl. - [Electric Industry](https://thebetterwebsite.com/portfolio/themes/electric-industry/): A bold, high-voltage colorway with a skewed, rotating-sheen CTA button and an ambient moving-line background. Built for and purchased by Aurum Recovery. - [Holotype](https://thebetterwebsite.com/portfolio/themes/holotype/): A 3D hologram theme where cards lean back and wireframe icons blink to life like cold projectors starting up. ## Optional - [Privacy](https://thebetterwebsite.com/privacy/): What The Better Website collects, which is very little: Google Analytics for visit counts, and the contact form. No advertising, no profiling, no data sold.