Skootle is one person building serious websites for serious local businesses.
Based in Richmond, VA. Working with clients across Richmond Metro and Hampton Roads. No team to feed, no agency overhead to pass along, no kickoff deck full of stock photos.
Built sites that ran businesses since 1996. Still doing it.
I have been shipping web infrastructure since the late nineties. Earlier in my career I built automation platforms used by more than 129,000 businesses. Skootle is the agency I always wanted to hire when I was a small-business owner: fast to respond, technically uncompromising, and honest about what's actually moving the needle.
Most local agencies sell you a template, charge a retainer, and disappear. Most national agencies sell you a slide deck, charge five figures, and hand the work to a junior. Skootle is built to be neither. The person you email is the person designing, coding, writing schema, and watching your rankings.
We use in-house AI tooling because it lets one person ship the work of five. It does not run your account. It is a tool, not a feature on this page.
Four rules we don't break.
Receipts over promises
Every claim on this site is backed by a real Lighthouse score, a real client URL, or a real PageSpeed report. No invented metrics. No stock testimonials.
One operator
You email me, you get me. No account manager funnel. No junior designer learning React on your project. The person on the call is the person shipping the code.
Local first
We are strongest in Richmond Metro and Hampton Roads because we already have the citation, review, and link infrastructure in place. New markets take longer to move. We will tell you which one you are.
Anti-bullshit copy
Your customers do not search for 'transform' or 'leverage.' They search for 'lock rekey Richmond' and 'closest plumber'. We write for the search, not for the awards show.
The work, public and indexable.
Every link below is a live site or product, not a case study screenshot. Open them, run Lighthouse on them, and inspect the schema yourself.
- Client site
Petrone Locksmith
Woman-owned locksmith serving Richmond Metro. 250+ SEO pages across 26 service areas, sub-second LCP.
Richmond, VA · Home Services - Client site
Jason Burford Real Estate
Sotheby's-affiliated agent, 25+ Richmond neighborhood guides, custom property search, direct lead capture.
Richmond, VA · Real Estate - Client site
Thistle Britches Cabin
Luxury vacation rental in Pigeon Forge, TN. Direct booking site replaces Airbnb / VRBO fees. iCal sync, FAQPage schema, 92 photos.
Pigeon Forge, TN · Hospitality - Live WordPress install
Burford Advertising
Runs our in-house WordPress AI plugin (Darwin Brain Connector). Native Abilities API + Block Bindings. We do not just consume the web stack, we extend it.
Richmond, VA · Agency - Built by Skootle
SignalRVA
Richmond-focused publishing surface. Custom build, fast load, indexable from day one. Another Skootle ship.
Richmond, VA · Local media
What we actually build with.
Boring choices, well-made. Nothing here is novel for the sake of novel. Each tool earns its place by being the right answer for local-business sites that have to load fast and rank.
- Next.js + React on Vercel's edge
- TypeScript end to end
- Schema.org markup hand-written, not generated
- Tailwind for design, not bootstrap themes
- Sanity, Notion, or custom CMS depending on the project
- PostgreSQL via Supabase or Vercel Postgres
- Sentry for errors, Vercel Analytics for traffic, GA4 when required
- Resend for transactional email with SPF, DKIM, DMARC set up properly
- DataForSEO and GSC for keyword and rank data
- In-house AI tooling for content scaffolding, schema generation, and competitor monitoring
We also build the AI infrastructure most agencies just talk about.
The same shop that ships your website can ship custom MCP servers, Claude skills, and AI agents for your team. We set up Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and Claude Desktop for clients who want to actually use this stuff from their phone, not just read about it on LinkedIn.
Ready to put us to work?
We reply within a business day. No sales call required.