MMakeHelm / design options
Logo marks →

Eight directions for the MakeHelm Ltd landing page

Same company, same copy, eight completely different personalities. Each one is a finished, standalone page — click through, scroll it properly, then pick one. The rest get deleted. Previews below are live pages scaled down, so what you see is what ships.

MakeHelm Ltd Est. 2026 Company No. 17433308 England & Wales [email protected]

01 Editorial

Broadsheet masthead, serif type, column-set prose, drop cap.

Open →
SaysOld money, new company. The company number and "Est. MMXXVI" read as credentials, not decoration. Borrows a century of newspaper authority.
Best forBuyers and acquirers. Anyone who needs to believe there's a real business behind the products.
RiskReads slightly slow and traditional for a software studio — the opposite of "ships in weeks".
UpkeepLow — a portfolio table, easy to add rows to.

02 Swiss Grid

Hard 12-column grid, huge tight type, white, one orange accent.

Open →
SaysDesign-literate and confident. Nothing to hide behind — no gradients, no illustrations, just structure and typography.
Best forFounders shopping for someone with taste. Reads as premium without saying "premium".
RiskUnforgiving. Weak copy or a ragged product list has nowhere to hide on this much white space.
UpkeepLowest — product rows are one line of markup each.

03 Terminal

Phosphor green on black, monospace, window chrome, CRT scanlines.

Open →
SaysA builder runs this. Maximum credibility with developers and the indie-hacker crowd; the status readout does the bragging for you.
Best forPeer respect, Hacker News, dev-tool positioning. Strongest fit for RivalCheck's audience.
RiskActively costs you non-technical MVP clients — a non-dev founder may not understand it's a business.
UpkeepLow — but the ASCII rules need hand-fitting if columns change.

04 Corporate

Light navy/teal, rounded cards, stat bar, sticky nav, trust footer.

Open →
SaysA company you can safely wire money to. The most conventional read of "we just became a Ltd" — stats, credentials, clear service offer.
Best forPaid MVP work. If the goal is client enquiries with real budgets, this converts best.
RiskLooks like a thousand other studios. Nothing here is memorable a week later.
UpkeepMedium — most components, and the stat bar needs keeping honest.

05 Poster

Brand yellow blocks, Archivo Black at 190px, marquee, hard shadows.

Open →
SaysWe have a personality and we're not sorry. Keeps the existing yellow/orange but stops apologising for it. Screenshots well on social.
Best forBeing remembered. Strongest brand asset of the eight if MakeHelm ever needs to be a name people repeat.
RiskLoud. A cautious corporate client may read it as a side project rather than a firm.
UpkeepHigher — big type needs manual line breaks; long product names fight the grid.

06 Nocturne

Refined dark, amber gradients, glass panels, subtle grain. Today's site, grown up.

Open →
SaysSame studio, properly finished. Closest to what's live now, so nothing about the brand has to be relearned — it just stops looking like a template.
Best forThe safe upgrade. Keeps dev credibility and still looks like a company. The default if you can't decide.
RiskFamiliar to the point of invisible — this is the house style of every AI startup right now.
UpkeepMedium — card-based, easy to extend, a few gradients to keep consistent.

07 Simple

Centred, dark, brass and grain. Serif. One column, no sections. Plus an SVG mark.

Open →
SaysWe have nothing to prove. No persuasion, no CTA button, no stat bar — just what exists and what happened to it. Reads like a brass plate on a dark door.
Best forA studio judged on its products, not its page. The one variant that could plausibly still be the site in five years.
RiskSells nothing. A founder looking for someone to build their MVP gets no reason here to pick you over anyone else.
UpkeepLowest of all eight — a product is four lines of HTML.

08 Sailing

Cartoon sky, drifting clouds, a boat on animated waves. Sticker cards, hand-drawn SVGs.

Open →
SaysSmall, friendly, and run by a human. The only variant that takes the name literally — a helm is a ship's wheel, so the whole page is a boat leaving harbour. Nothing else in the set is warm.
Best forBeing liked and remembered. Disarms the "is this a real company or one person?" question by not pretending otherwise.
RiskCharm cuts both ways — an acquirer doing diligence on a £50k product may not want cartoon boats. The nautical copy also has to stay a light touch or it turns into a theme park.
UpkeepHighest — hand-drawn SVGs and animation; new sections need illustration, not just markup.

When you've picked one

Every variant is a single self-contained file — no shared CSS, no build step. Promoting one is a copy and a delete:

cd tools/cloudflare-migration/sites/makehelm.com
cp design/0X-name.html index.html
# strip the two review-bar bits from index.html (the CSS block and the link before </body>)
rm -rf design
npx wrangler@3 pages deploy . --project-name makehelm --branch main
  1. Open each candidate full-screen and scroll it — the thumbnails flatten the differences.
  2. Check it on a phone. The toggle above swaps every preview to a 430px viewport.
  3. Decide on the audience, not the aesthetic: 04 if the page's job is client enquiries, 03 if it's peer credibility, 05 if it's being memorable, 02/01 if it's being taken seriously by a buyer, 06 if it's "just make the current one good", 07 if the products should speak and the page shouldn't, 08 if you'd rather be liked than respected.

One thing still open, whichever you pick. If you want the registered-office address in the footer (usual for a Ltd), send it over — I've left it out rather than invent one. ChurnHalt and BarkLinks have been dropped from every variant, so the portfolio now reads: RivalCheck, InternalNewsletter and RaceTrackDesign live, HustleSEO and PlatePose exited.

Fonts load from Google Fonts in all six. Worth knowing: the current live index.html asks for Gabarito but the font file was never copied into the Cloudflare snapshot, so today's site silently falls back to system sans. These don't have that problem.