
Ilya Pavlovski
Founder & Lead BuildSix months in a blue hard hat doing commercial construction, then two years on residential sites with no hard hat at all. Now he enjoys putting it on and taking it off, whichever the day calls for.
Hardhat Webdesign is a small studio that builds for trade businesses exclusively. We know what a quote looks like, how a job gets won, and why a slow website quietly costs you both.

Our founder spent six years estimating for a groundworks contractor before ever touching a line of code. The firm paid five figures for a website that took eleven seconds to load and never once appeared in a search result.
That was the whole lesson. Trade businesses were being sold websites by people who had never stood on a site, never priced a job, and never had to explain to a client why the phone stopped ringing.
So we built the studio we wished that company had hired — one that treats a website as a piece of work with a scope, a programme and a handover, not a creative exercise.
We have deliberately stayed small and stayed specialised. Here is roughly how the studio grew.
The switch from the trades to web development, with years of hands-on site work already behind it. The industry knowledge came first; the code came second.
The side work became the only work. No other industries, no other kind of client — just trade businesses that needed a site worth having.
Ten trade businesses launched and running, every one of them still ours to support.
No account managers and no handoffs. The people who scope your project are the people who build it and the people who answer the phone afterwards.

Six months in a blue hard hat doing commercial construction, then two years on residential sites with no hard hat at all. Now he enjoys putting it on and taking it off, whichever the day calls for.

Six years in a white hard hat, but never more than a week a year — that is how often field duty as a telecom engineer actually put him on site. A white hard hat guy without giving off the white hard hat vibes.
Send us the address of your current site. We will come back with an honest assessment of what is holding it back — no charge, no obligation.
Three recent projects, from an approved permit set to an early-stage massing study.