Marketing + brand websites
Astro + Tailwind v4 + framer-motion. SSR + edge-cached. Sites that load fast, score 95+ on Lighthouse, and let the brand voice through without performance tax.
03 · Web + mobile + commerce
Customer-facing platforms
that load before the user gives up.
Indian internet on a mid-tier Android over patchy 4G is the testbed. If your platform doesn't render the first useful frame inside 1.5 seconds on a Redmi Note in Tier-2 city traffic, you've lost a third of your audience before the conversation starts. We build for that constraint first, then add the polish for the laptop crowd.
Methodology
How digital presence actually moves at SFHL.
- 01
Performance budget + Core Web Vitals lock
Before a single component is built, we lock the budget: LCP under 1.8s on slow-4G, CLS under 0.05, INP under 200ms. The budget shapes every architecture decision — SSR vs SPA, bundle splitting, image strategy, font loading. The budget is reviewed weekly during build.
- 02
Information architecture + content design
What the user is trying to do — written in their language, on the page, in 3 seconds. We strip down before we add. Most marketing-style platforms have 4× the content their users actually need; we cut to the load-bearing 25%.
- 03
Build with the right tool, not the trendy one
Astro for content-heavy sites (zero JS by default, hydrate islands as needed). Next.js for app-shaped sites. React Native or native iOS/Android for true mobile. Headless commerce (Shopify Hydrogen / Medusa) when commerce is the use-case. We pick stack on first-render performance, not on resume-strength.
- 04
Accessibility, i18n, performance — non-negotiable
WCAG 2.2 AA minimum. Hindi + English at minimum, regional language as the audience demands. Lighthouse 95+ on production for every core flow. Accessibility is checked at the design layer, not bolted on at QA.
- 05
Operate + iterate retainer
Most platforms degrade not at launch but at 90 days, when the first feature creep hits. We retain on the platform for the post-launch window with a hard rule: no feature ships unless it fits inside the performance budget. The budget is the constraint, not the wish-list.
In scope
What we ship inside this pillar.
Customer portals + dashboards
Next.js + React for authenticated app-shaped surfaces. SSR for cold-start performance, ISR for stable content, RSC where it earns the complexity.
Mobile apps
React Native for cross-platform (most of the time, the right call). Native Swift / Kotlin where the platform-specific surface is the value.
Headless commerce
Shopify Hydrogen or Medusa back-end with a custom Astro / Next storefront. Build for the launch, not for the seven-figure GMV abstraction.
Stack
The technical surface for this pillar.
- Astro 5
- Next.js · React Server Components
- Tailwind CSS v4
- framer-motion
- React Native
- Shopify Hydrogen · Medusa
- Cloudflare Pages + Workers
- Lighthouse · WebPageTest discipline
Typical engagement
What working with us on this pillar looks like.
- Engagement shape
- Fixed-fee build phase (typical) or design-build retainer (when scope is exploratory). Operate retainer post-launch.
- Typical duration
- Marketing site: 4–8 weeks. Customer portal: 3–6 months. Mobile app from scratch: 4–8 months.
- Team commitment
- 1 design + 2 engineers for marketing build. 1 design + 3 engineers + 1 PM for portal / app builds.
- IP & deliverables
- Client owns the codebase + design files + deployment infrastructure. We document the system at handoff so any other team can take over without our help.
Got a digital presence problem we should look at?
First conversation is 30 minutes, founder-led, no funnel routing.