Seattle & King County
Web design & development in Seattle
PortNW builds and maintains websites for Seattle-area businesses and organizations, two of them in downtown Seattle, one with us for nearly a decade. We handle the website, the search visibility and the listings behind it, so all three say the same thing.
Talk About Your ProjectWhat we have built for Seattle
Not a list of logos: the actual work, and what happened to it afterwards.
Spectrum Dermatology of Seattle
Downtown Seattle
A boutique dermatology clinic, redesigned from the ground up on a new business roadmap. It has since grown into a substantial e-commerce operation with custom WooCommerce development and extended plugin work, and we manage the practice’s Google listings as well.
Pacific Orthodontics
Downtown Seattle
A client for nearly ten years, and one of the longest-running relationships in the studio. The site has been rebuilt and refined repeatedly as the practice grew; it is currently running a search and AI-visibility improvement program with us.
Institute for Family Development
Federal Way ยท King County
A 501(c)(3) in children and family services since 1982, reaching roughly 3,000 children a year across Washington State. We built the site to an approved design produced by another firm, bilingual throughout, and maintained by us since.
What Seattle businesses hire us for
The city has no shortage of agencies. What clients tend to come to us for is depth on a particular problem rather than a new brand.
WordPress development
Custom themes and Oxygen builds with no page-builder bloat, written to be fast, secure and maintainable by whoever inherits it, including custom plugins when the right one doesn’t exist.
E-commerce and WooCommerce
Stores, subscriptions, memberships and the custom development a real catalogue demands, built around your actual fulfilment, tax and shipping rules rather than a plugin default that half-works.
SEO, local search and AI visibility
Technical SEO, Google Business Profile management and the GEO work that decides what ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews say about you. More on our search page.
Medical, dental and med spa practices
Sites that build enough trust for a patient to book, with patient information handled carefully and the compliance decisions left where they belong. See web design for practices.
Nonprofits and membership organizations
Sites the people running the organization can actually maintain, including the tools a small team needs: member directories, events, dues and volunteer coordination. See nonprofit websites.
Custom applications and internal tools
The software that doesn’t exist yet: dashboards, booking flows, integrations and bespoke WooCommerce work, including a Three.js configurator and a Moodle analytics dashboard in the portfolio.
A studio an hour down I-5
PortNW is one person in Tumwater, about an hour south of downtown. That is worth being straight about, because it cuts both ways.
What you lose: an office to visit, a team to call on when a project needs three things at once, and the reassurance of a familiar Seattle postcode. What you get instead: the person who writes the code is the person you talk to, every time. There is no account manager relaying messages, no junior learning on your budget, no agency overhead priced into the invoice. Every Seattle project in this portfolio has been run exactly that way, and two of them have been running for the better part of a decade.
The studio has been building websites since 2007, long enough to have watched every shift from table layouts to mobile-first to AI search. Clients who started with us are still with us, which is the part a portfolio cannot show you.
Questions we get asked
Do you work with businesses in Seattle? +
Yes. Three of them, two in downtown Seattle. One is a boutique dermatology clinic we redesigned and have supported for years, since grown into a substantial online store with custom WooCommerce development. Another is a downtown orthodontic practice that has been with the studio for nearly a decade, currently running a search and AI-visibility improvement program. The third is a nonprofit in Federal Way serving around 3,000 children a year across Washington State.
Do we have to meet in person? +
No. Every Seattle project we have run has been remote: phone, email and video, on your schedule. We are based in Tumwater and work with clients across the Puget Sound region and further afield as a matter of course, so distance has never been the deciding factor in whether a project works.
How do you compare with a Seattle agency? +
Different shape, and worth understanding before you choose. You are not paying for account managers, sales staff or office space, and you are not getting a team. You are getting one senior developer who does the work and answers the phone in year five as well as week one. For projects that need a large team or a big-budget media campaign, an agency is the right call. For a website that has to be built properly and still be maintained in a decade, this is usually cheaper and steadier.
Do you only build WordPress sites? +
Mostly, because it is what most clients can actually maintain themselves, plus custom WordPress plugins when an off-the-shelf one does not fit. Beyond that we write custom PHP and JavaScript: an interactive Three.js product configurator, a Moodle analytics dashboard, and our own history archive are all in the portfolio. If WordPress is the wrong tool for what you need, we will say so.
Can you work with the site we already have? +
Often, yes. Some sites need a rebuild; plenty need faster pages, a clearer structure, content that answers what customers actually ask, working structured data and accurate business listings. We will tell you which one you are looking at rather than selling you a rebuild you do not need.
Tell us what you are trying to build
We will tell you what your project needs first, and whether we are the right studio for it.
Start a Project