Opta - One Man’s Obsession to Optimise

How I got here

I've spent over 1,000 hours building my own software. Apps, tools and products, designed and shipped end to end, on my own, for whoever would use them. That is where I learned what a build actually costs and how much of it never shows up on the screen.

Building a brand around that work is where the obsession started. I wanted to know what actually makes a website optimal, and the answer had almost nothing to do with code. It is psychology: what a visitor sees in the first few seconds, the order information arrives in, what the page asks them to do, and how it earns trust before a word is read. Nearly all of it lands subconsciously.

That is why people can tell a good website from a bad one but can rarely say why. The techniques work on how people decide, in intricate ways you only notice once you have built these things yourself. A good site is not decoration. It is dozens of small, deliberate choices doing their job without being noticed.

So I pointed the obsession at local businesses that don't have it in-house. A trade business can be excellent at the work and still lose the job, because the site looked like a template and the enquiry sat in an inbox overnight. That is a solvable problem. It is the one I solve.

I work from Melbourne, on Melbourne businesses, and I answer my own email.