Jacob Campbell

Why I build this way

Most small businesses end up on a platform that charges them forever for a site that loads slowly. A typical WordPress page pulls in roughly 22 plugin stylesheets, 14 render-blocking scripts and 6 external font requests before a visitor sees anything, which is why those sites average a Largest Contentful Paint around 3.8 seconds. Google measures that. So do the people who bounce.

Writing the PHP by hand removes the problem instead of optimizing around it. Nothing loads that the page does not need, so every site I ship is guaranteed to score 96–100 on Google Lighthouse and load in under a second — with full JSON-LD structured data, technical SEO and responsive layouts built in rather than bolted on afterwards. It is slower to build. It is considerably better to own.

The other half of it is ownership. A one-time fee means there is no subscription that quietly outgrows the value of the site, no platform lock-in, and no renewal that holds your business hostage. You get the source code outright, permanently.

What I've built here

This site is the working demonstration of the argument above — it is entirely hand-written PHP, and it is the largest single thing I maintain.

I write everything published under the blog myself — Core Web Vitals, migrating off WordPress, Stripe integration, schema markup, accessibility. It is the same material I use when advising a client, written down.

I also build for the machines now reading the web on people's behalf. This site publishes a live A2A agent card, a Model Context Protocol server, in-browser WebMCP tools, and content negotiation that serves clean Markdown to any agent that asks for it. Very few small studios have done that work; I think it is where discovery is heading.

Background

I came to this from computer science rather than from design tools. I hold a B.S. in Computer Science with a minor in Cybersecurity from Florida Atlantic University, where I also spent two years as a technical lab technician maintaining and troubleshooting the systems other students relied on. That background is why the security and performance parts of a build are not an afterthought here — they are the part I was actually trained in.

Before BuiltToWinWeb I built a full-stack ecommerce platform end to end: Stripe checkout for live payments, a SQL database handling products, pricing and orders, and the backend order processing behind it. I have also built and continue to maintain a live commercial cleaning company's website — real ongoing client work, not a portfolio mock-up. Those two projects are why the ecommerce and Stripe integration offerings on this site exist: I had shipped them before I sold them.

What I work on

How working together goes

1. A consultation first. Before any money changes hands we talk about what you actually need. This is required — I do not take payment for a project I have not scoped, and the pay buttons on this site are gated behind it deliberately.
2. A fixed, written quote. One number, all of it, in writing. Business sites start at $3,000, ecommerce at $8,000 and web applications at $15,000.
3. Roughly a month to build. The clock starts once the consultation has happened and you have given me the content and access I need.
4. You own it. The source code is yours outright. No subscription, no licence, no renewal, no platform that can change the terms on you later.

Education & certifications

Verify who I am

You should not have to take a website's word for who wrote it. These are my profiles elsewhere, and they are the same ones referenced in this page's structured data: