# This website — designed, then written in code

> Palma Design · Design studio · 2026 · Palma Design
> Built with: Astro, Claude, Keystatic, Netlify
> Results: 0 page builders or templates · Static HTML — no client-side rendering · Full SEO, schema & llms.txt layer
> Source: https://palmadesign.io/work/palmadesign-io

---

The best proof a studio can offer for how it builds websites is the one you're currently reading. palmadesign.io was designed here and then written in code with Claude — no theme, no page builder, no plugin stack.

## Why hand-coded

Most small-business websites carry an invisible tax: a page builder rendering bloated markup, a plugin stack that needs constant updates, and hosting that gets slower as the stack grows. We skip all of it. The site is static HTML built with Astro — every page exists as a finished document before a visitor ever asks for it.

That has three practical consequences:

- **Speed.** There's nothing to compute on request, so pages arrive instantly — which visitors feel and Google measures.
- **Findability.** Clean, semantic HTML with a complete schema.org graph and an `llms.txt` index means search engines *and* AI assistants can read everything without executing a line of JavaScript.
- **Durability.** No plugins to patch, no builder subscription, no stack rot. A static site built this way runs for years.

## Designed and coded by the same hands

The design system — the type pairing, the dark hero, the yellow accents, the fanned image deck — was designed and implemented by the same person. There was no handoff from designer to developer, so nothing was lost in translation: the spacing, the typography and the motion behave exactly as drawn.

## Editable without touching code

Content lives in Keystatic, a Git-based CMS: the studio edits case studies, gallery pieces and journal posts in a friendly interface, and every change is a clean commit that redeploys the site automatically. All the control of hand-written code, none of the fragility of a database CMS.

This is the same setup we build for clients — designed to your brand, written in code, and handed over with everything included.