João de Brito, painter
Squarespace was raising his renewal for services he didn't use, and he couldn't get in to update his own gallery. He kept the design he liked and left anyway.
What changed
What they had
- On Squarespace, with the annual renewal going up to $280 for services he didn't use
- Couldn't get into the site to update it himself
- Content had gone out of date, and the gallery needed recent work and images
- Paying a platform to host a site he effectively couldn't change
What they have now
- The same design he already liked, rebuilt in our own code
- Content brought current, with the gallery and images updated
- A page per painting, so a collector can link to one piece and Google can index it
- He updates it by telling Claude what to change — no logging into anything
- Hosted by us, with no platform subscription behind it
João is a Portuguese-born impressionist and figurative painter working in oils, much of it en plein air. The site carries his own motto — Ars longa, vita brevis, life is short and art lasts.
You don’t have to give up the design to leave the platform
This is the objection that keeps people on Squarespace: leaving feels like starting over, and if you like how your site looks, why risk it?
João liked his design. So we kept it. We took the look he already had, rebuilt it in our own code, and pointed his web address at the new one. What he lost was the annual bill and the locked door. What he kept was his site.
That’s worth saying plainly, because “we’ll replace it” and “you’ll lose what you have” are not the same thing — and platforms benefit from you confusing the two.
The renewal that prompted it
Squarespace was moving his annual hosting up to $280, for a bundle of services a working painter has no use for. Meanwhile he couldn’t reliably get in to change anything, so the content had drifted out of date and the gallery was missing recent work.
Paying more each year to host a site you can’t edit is a bad trade, and a common one.
Everything serves the paintings
On an artist’s site, design confidence means restraint. Any colour we introduced would compete directly with the work, so the palette stays close to neutral and the typography stays quiet. The paintings supply all the colour on the page.
The gallery gives each painting its own page rather than trapping it in a lightbox. That matters twice over: a collector can send someone a link to one specific piece, and search engines can index individual works — which is how a fair number of people find a painter at all.
Now he just asks
The part he notices day to day: he doesn’t log into anything. He tells Claude what he wants changed — a new painting, an exhibition date, a bit of copy — and it’s done.
That only works because the site is plain code in plain files. A Squarespace site is stored in a private format nothing outside Squarespace can read, so no AI assistant can help with it however good they get. Hand-written code is legible to anyone and anything you point at it. It’s the same property that makes the site transferable, and it’s becoming one of the better arguments for building this way at all.
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