---
title: Argnode, our own first client | Argnode
description: We built our own digital foundation the way we would build yours: search strategy before layout, brand before copy, and infrastructure we own outright.
lang: en
canonical: https://www.argnode.com/en/references/argnode
---

Reference · Our own first client
# Our first client was ourselves.
Argnode did not start with a website. It started with the decisions underneath one: what we sell, who should find us, where our data lives, and who still has our mail if a vendor closes our account on a Sunday.
This reference is a company's whole digital foundation, built in the order we would build yours. Every layer of it is open to inspection, which is the part most references cannot offer.
[Talk to us](https://www.argnode.com/en/contact)
[How we work](https://www.argnode.com/en/process)

## The part of a digital business nobody plans

Almost nobody decides their digital foundation. They accumulate it. A domain gets registered in a hurry by whoever was free that week, a site gets built on the platform an agency happened to prefer, a mailbox lands wherever the first laptop was set up, and five years later the company runs on a stack no one chose and nobody can fully account for.

The bill for that arrives late and in an inconvenient form: a domain registered to somebody who has since left, a website that cannot be edited without the agency that built it, a mailbox on a platform whose business model is reading it. None of those are technical problems. They are business problems that were settled by default, years earlier, by not being settled at all.

We had the rare luxury of starting from nothing, so we decided all of it on purpose. What follows is what that looks like when the person building it has to live with the consequences.

## Search strategy came before the first page

The site's structure is not a design decision here, it is the output of keyword research. We worked out which searches a buyer actually runs before they hire someone like us, grouped them, and let that decide what pages exist, what each page is allowed to be about, and which page owns which term. Only then did anyone write a headline.

### Brand before copy, layout last

Brand came next and copy came last. The voice was written down before a word of the site was, so the tone would be a decision rather than an accident of whoever was drafting that day. Layout came last of all, out of the content rather than ahead of it. Nobody drew a wireframe and then asked what text might fill it.

That order is the whole method, and it is available to you as a service. Most sites are built in exactly the reverse order, which is why so many of them look considered and rank for nothing.

### The design system is published, not described

The look and feel, the logo and the marks built from it are ours as well, and the system behind them is published rather than described: [our design system](https://www.argnode.com/static/brand/design-system.html) states every rule with the reason for it, and computes its own contrast ratios and colour separations on the page so that a token which drifts shows up as a visibly wrong document instead of a quietly stale one. The chart colours were chosen by measurement rather than by eye, and verified under simulated colour vision deficiency. This is engineering-led design, and it is available to buy. For a large brand identity programme another agency is very likely better than us, and we will say so. We can, however, use a ruler.

### Search Built to be found {fig=sitemap}
Every page targets researched search terms in each language, on top of the technical layer search engines reward. Search engine optimisation (SEO) was the first constraint, not the last pass.

### Languages Written for each market {fig=markets}
No language on this site is a machine translation of another. Each one is transcreated: rewritten so it carries the same meaning and the same register to a reader who lives in that market, rather than swapped word for word.

### Ownership Owned end to end {fig=ownership}
The domain, the hardware, the mail, the code and the content are ours outright. Nothing here is rented from a platform that could change its terms.

### Machines Readable by people and machines {fig=machine-readable}
Standard metadata for search engines and link previews, plus a clean text copy of every page for AI systems that would rather read than parse a layout.

## The infrastructure is ours, and that is a business decision

This page is served from our own hardware, a Raspberry Pi 5 in our own rack, published through a Cloudflare tunnel that reaches out to the internet rather than letting the internet reach in. There are no inbound ports open on it and our home address is not in any public record of it. Content is copied to the machine by an automated release and switched over in one atomic step, so a bad deploy is undone in seconds rather than repaired live.

### Four reasons that are not technical

None of that is self-hosting for its own sake.

**Continuity.** Backups run onsite nightly and offsite encrypted, and the ordering path is built to accept and queue work even when the rest of our systems are unreachable, so an outage delays an order rather than losing one.

**Privacy.** Data we hold about clients sits on machines we physically control, in Europe, and does not take a detour through anyone else's supply chain on the way.

**Ownership.** We are not a tenant. No platform can change its pricing, its terms or its export policy and make our business somebody else's problem.

**Cost.** The whole public edge runs on hardware that costs less than most companies spend on a single managed hosting plan.

### The trade we accepted

Our own connectivity is now our uptime, and a fire or a theft at one address has no geographic redundancy behind it. We accept that trade deliberately, we monitor it, and we would not recommend the same arrangement to a business whose revenue stops when its site does. For that case we would put you somewhere with a service level agreement and say so plainly.

## Mail is infrastructure, not an app

Company mail is usually the last thing anyone thinks about and the first thing that hurts. Ours is end-to-end encrypted and European, hosted by Proton in Switzerland under an adequacy decision that keeps it inside the same legal regime as the rest of our data. Sending is authenticated so that nothing can be sent in our name from anywhere else, and every address, including the automated ones, has a human behind it who can be reached directly.

That matters commercially more than it sounds. Mail is where quotes, contracts and client data actually live. A mailbox on a free consumer platform is a business continuity risk and a confidentiality one at the same time, and it is the cheapest of all of these decisions to get right at the start.

**Curious how the site itself works?** The content model, the publishing pipeline, the page signatures and the reason there is no content management system are a separate read: [How this website is built](https://www.argnode.com/en/articles/website-without-a-cms).

## What it adds up to

###  Multilanguage
Each variation is written for its own market rather than translated into it, and adding the next one adds a folder, not a rebuild.

###  Zero inbound ports
Nothing can open a connection to the machine that serves this page. It reaches out to the internet, and nothing reaches back in.

###  Every commit agent-written
A person approved each one before it reached the live site, and the whole history is in version control where anybody in the company can read it.

###  Signatures you can verify
A copy of the page and one standard command on your own machine are enough to confirm that the words are the ones a named human signed.

###  About 13 euros a year
That is the electricity to host this entire website, at 30 cents per kilowatt hour. There is no hosting invoice underneath it, because there is no host to invoice us.

## Why this could be your setup

Most companies will never rebuild their foundation from scratch, and they do not need to. What they can do is stop letting it be decided by whoever is nearest. The order is the transferable part: work out what people search for, decide the brand, then write, then build, and choose each piece of infrastructure on what happens the day it fails rather than on what it costs the day you buy it.

We can do that work with you at whatever depth you want it, from a search strategy that reorganises the site you already have, to the whole foundation the way we built ours.

Probably not for you if you want the cheapest possible site by Friday. That is a real need and there are people who serve it well. This is the other thing: a digital foundation you own, designed in an order that survives contact with the next five years.

See also:
- [How this website is built, and why there is no CMS](https://www.argnode.com/en/articles/website-without-a-cms)
- [How we work](https://www.argnode.com/en/process)
- [Orange Advertising, our agency partner](https://www.argnode.com/en/references/orange-advertising)

### Wondering what your own foundation is standing on?
Tell us what you have inherited, and we will tell you straight what is worth keeping.
[Get in touch](https://www.argnode.com/en/contact)