The trade
Webpublishing
The word is uncommon in French, and it is more exact than the ones used in its place. It means publishing on the web the way one publishes a paper: with a making, an issue and a keeping.
Definition
What the word means
« Building a website » describes a single day, the day it goes live. That day is the least important of the three thousand that follow. The word webpublishing carries the whole: the making, yes, but also regular issues and keeping the thing alive over time.
The difference is not one of vocabulary. It changes what you invoice, what you promise, and what you deliver. A supplier selling a build sells a finished object. A house doing webpublishing sells something that goes on existing after it.
It also explains our technical choices. A page served as it stands, with no database to query and no program to run, does not merely open faster: it does not break down while nobody looks at it for two years.
The chain
The chain, motion by motion
Six stages, in this order. It is also how a quote is broken down, line by line, and how we say where a job stands without using a single trade word.
-
Understanding
Before drawing anything, you need to know who arrives, what they are after, and what they must be able to do within thirty seconds. A site that fails almost always fails here, not in the code.
-
Writing
The words come before the layout, never the reverse. A mock-up filled with dummy text produces pages that can hold no true sentence, and the rest of the project is spent cutting ideas down to fit a box.
-
Composing
One grid, two typefaces, a palette of six colours. Constraints are not a poverty of means, they are what makes thirty pages look like they belong to the same volume.
-
Building
The site is compiled into static pages, once, on our machine. What reaches the server is text and images, nothing that runs. That is why our pages appear before you have let go of the mouse.
-
Publishing
Going live switches from one version to the next without interruption, and the previous version stays in place until the following one. Rolling back takes a second, which is what makes publishing unfrightening.
-
Maintaining
Certificates, backups, updates, watching for pages that stop answering. The part nobody asks to see, and the only one that decides whether the site is still standing in five years.
Method
Why static pages
Most small business sites run on an engine that rebuilds every page on every visit, querying a database, to arrive invariably at the same result. That is an expenditure of energy and an attack surface, in exchange for a flexibility those sites never use.
We do the computing once, at build time, and serve the result. So there is no engine to update in a hurry, no database to back up, no administration password to defend, and nothing to hack that is not already public.
The price is real and we say so: anything that must change on every visit, a basket, an account, live stock, is not done this way. That is exactly the boundary of what we take on.
Measurement
What it comes to, in figures
Measured on this very page, first visit, empty cache. You can check it in your browser’s network tab.
- HTML page
- 6,3 ko
- compressed, as it travels
- Stylesheet
- 7,8 ko
- a single one, compressed
- Typefaces
- 88 ko
- two variable fonts, self-hosted
- JavaScript
- 0
- none, on any page
- Third-party requests
- 0
- everything comes from one server
- Home page film
- 56 ko
- eight seconds, silent, on that page only
An ordinary presentation site, loaded with its engine, its consent banner and its three measurement tools, sits between two and four megabytes. The ratio is not a matter of a few per cent.
Measured on 27 July 2026.
Next
Web regulation
We keep this file because the question comes up at every quote, and because the answers in circulation are wrong half the time. Every statement points to the text behind it, so that you can check rather than believe us.
Website regulation: Switzerland, Europe, the world