Why this website beats the alternatives

No. Groundhouse is a fictional karate dojo Loam Agency invented to show what we build. The website, though, is completely real: built with the same tools, standards and security as our client sites.

Because our clients' privacy matters more than our portfolio. Many of the businesses we work with handle sensitive information, and not every owner wants their site picked apart as a sales example. So we built a fictional business for every industry we serve: you get to see everything, and nobody's real business is on display.

Everything except the business. The pages are managed in a real content management system, the search and AI-answer markup is real, the forms really submit and really filter spam, and the security matches every client site. The products, prices, people and reviews are invented. (We hoped a reviewer named Sam Ple would give it away.)

Please do. They work, and every one of them goes to Loam Agency, so nobody will teach you a roundhouse kick, but a real person will read it. Each form ends with a plot twist: tell us about your actual business and we'll race your website against this one.

Yes. Try the switch in the header. Light and dark are each designed, not one inverted from the other, and every text and background pair is contrast-checked in both. Until you choose, the site follows your device's setting.

That's why it exists. Yours would be designed around your brand, written for your customers and filled with your real content, built to the same standards you see here. Tell us about your business on the Get a Site Like This page.

AI builders can produce a good-looking first draft in minutes, and that's genuinely useful. The trouble starts on day two. Most of those sites have no content management system, so every change, from a new price to holiday hours, means going back to the prompt box or paying someone to edit code nobody planned. This site gives you an editor built for the job.

Some are. Many aren't, because the tools optimize for "looks finished," not for the unglamorous parts: secret keys shipped to the browser, databases left open, forms with no spam protection, and nobody applying updates. This site is locked down by default, and a person checks it every month.

It's usually the first thing skipped. Missing titles and descriptions, several H1s on one page, no structured data, no sitemap. On this site those are built into the foundation, so they're right on every page without anyone having to remember.

You can, but each new prompt can quietly rewrite parts you didn't ask it to touch. A site built on a design system and a CMS changes only what you change.

Custom can be wonderful, right up until the developer who built it moves on. Then you own a one-of-a-kind codebase that one person understood, with no admin panel (or a homemade one), and every small change becomes a project. Loam sites are custom-designed and built on a documented, tested framework that our whole team knows, so your site never depends on one person.

You make most of them yourself in the admin: text, images, pages, menus, FAQs, products and team members. For bigger changes, the team that maintains the foundation is still here, so you're never hunting for the one person who knows how it works.

It can. As we improve security, speed and search features, those improvements are applied to your site during maintenance, so it doesn't stay frozen the day it launched. Your site stays its own throughout: its own code, its own database and its own hosting, never shared with another client.

WordPress powers a huge share of the web and has a plugin for almost everything. That's also its biggest risk: most WordPress security problems come from plugins and themes, and a typical small-business site runs a dozen or more, each needing its own updates. This site has no plugin marketplace. Its features are built in and maintained together.

WordPress core is well maintained. The risk is the ecosystem around it: outdated plugins, abandoned themes, a login page at the same well-known address on millions of sites, and a public API that reveals more than most owners realize. On this site, the admin is private and the content API is closed to anonymous visitors.

With a page builder, WordPress is flexible, sometimes too flexible. It's easy to drag a section slightly off-brand, and heavy page builders can slow a site down. Here, editors work with sections already designed for the brand, so the content changes and the design holds.

Yes. Loam has a migration process built for it: we capture your existing pages, content and images and rebuild them on this foundation. You keep what works and leave the plugin updates behind.

Webflow is an excellent design tool, and its sites can look beautiful. The difference is control. On Webflow you rent the platform, and what your site can do is what your plan allows, from CMS item limits to features tied to pricing tiers. This site runs on open-source software, so it isn't capped by someone else's pricing page.

You can export the HTML and CSS, but the CMS and forms don't come along in working form, so leaving usually means rebuilding. This site is built on open-source software (Payload CMS and Next.js), and its content exports to spreadsheets whenever you want.

Simple text edits, no. But Webflow is built around its Designer, and bigger changes usually go back to whoever knows it well. Here, adding a page means choosing from layouts already designed for your brand.

They're a solid way to get online fast, and for some businesses that's enough. The trade-offs show up later: you can't take the site with you if you leave, you're limited to what the template and app store allow, and search features are mostly settings rather than built-in structure.

The subscription is cheaper. The hours aren't free: designing, writing, fixing the phone layout, learning SEO settings and keeping it all current. Most owners we meet built their site one weekend and never found another weekend to update it. The real cost of a DIY site is the work that never gets done.

Yes, that part doesn't change. You get an admin built around your content, with your sections already designed, so updating the site feels like filling in a form, not redesigning a page.

AEO, or answer engine optimization, makes your content easy for AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI answers to understand and quote. This site does it with structured data on every page, FAQ markup like the questions you're reading now, a clean heading outline, and an llms.txt file written for AI crawlers.

It labels your content for machines: this is a business, these are its hours, this is a product and its price, these are questions and answers. Search engines use it for rich results, and AI tools use it to answer accurately. This site generates it from the content itself, so it never goes stale.

WebMCP is an emerging web standard, currently being tested in Chrome, that lets AI agents in a visitor's browser use a website directly, asking it for services, articles or contact details instead of guessing from the screen. This site already speaks it, so it's ready as browsers and assistants adopt it.

Yes. It recognizes AI crawlers like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity and counts their visits page by page, so you can see which pages AI tools are actually reading. Most sites have no idea.

Nobody honest can promise that. What we can promise is that nothing technical holds it back: fast pages, one clear H1, real meta descriptions, canonical URLs, a sitemap, images search engines can crawl, and structured data. Then your content and your reputation do the rest.

Mostly by leaving things out. There's no plugin marketplace, no public data API, no secret keys in the page source and no default passwords. Forms are filtered for spam and abuse, the admin is private, and every site gets a monthly security and maintenance review.

Each month we check every dependency for known vulnerabilities and available updates, confirm the site's integrations still work and run a security audit. Then you get a plain-language report of what we found and what we did about it.

Yes, without making visitors solve puzzles. Every form has a hidden field that bots fill in and people never see, plus a size limit, a same-site check and a per-visitor rate limit. Try one: the forms on this site are working demos.

Only what someone types into a form, plus anonymous traffic data if the owner turns analytics on. Integration keys stay on the server and never reach the browser. (These sample sites also keep one small cookie that remembers which sample site you started on, so the bar at the top can take you back to it. It holds the site's name and nothing about you.)

Yes. Text, images, pages, menus, FAQs, products, events and team members are all edited in a private admin, with drafts and live preview so you see a change before your visitors do.

It's built not to. Pages are made of sections already styled for your brand, and the colors and fonts come from your design system, so a new page looks like it belongs.

Yes. Your brand lives in a design system (colors, type, spacing and styles as tokens), so a refresh is designed once and carried through every page, in light mode and dark, instead of redesigning pages one by one.

Loam: real people who know your site, not a support queue and a community forum.