About Us.

Toast is a full service design and web studio based in Oxfordshire.

The studio was set up in 1997, and we built our first website that same year.

We design and build bespoke WordPress sites for clients that need 100% control of their content with a sharp focus on SEO.

The sites we develop are easy to use, lightweight and built for marketing teams to win new business from the SERPs.

We’re a content-first agency, which means everything we do is focused on search results, visitor engagement, conversion and new lead generation.

We have a team of 17 in-house designers, developers, copywriters and thinkers.

WordPress Core Development.

While some agencies develop websites to lock their clients into them, we work within the open-source ethos.

WordPress is famously free.

We don’t own it, so we don’t do anything that will tie you into our dev team moving forward.

We build complex sites with simple code that any experienced WordPress developer can understand.

We don’t use SASS, CSS compilers, CSS libraries, or complex frameworks – there’s nothing wrong with these, but we prefer to keep things simple.

Keeping things simple results in:

• Faster sites
• Future-proofing
• Fewer dependencies
• Fewer things to go wrong
• Everything plays nicely together

Need a new bespoke WP site?

Get in touch for a no-obligation consultation and proposal.

Our experience.

Over 25 years, we’ve built 100s of websites.

Starting with hand-coded HTML in the ’90s, moving into bespoke-built content management systems in the early noughties, and then exclusively using WordPress in 2010, we’ve experienced every major content management issue.

We used WordPress to build useful content-managed websites when others considered WP ‘just a blogging platform’.

This experience joins every project we work on; our core aim is to make your website work harder for your business – whatever that looks like for your bottom line.

With work best with…

People who prioritise content as the core of their website recognise that, while design is important, it is just one part of the bigger picture, not the central focus.

We strive to keep things simple. Website visitors prefer simple, and so do search engines.

Content is what brings visitors to your website, so we encourage our clients to adopt this mindset.

What you have to say is the most important thing about your business, so we work best with clients who have plenty to say and say it uniquely.

We work best with clients who have something interesting to say and want their message to be the main course.

Do we think design is important? Sure – we have a branding team that testifies to that, but we are a content-first agency, so if your prime consideration is ‘what it looks like’ rather than ‘how it achieves my goals‘, we might not be a good fit.

Our culture.

It’s not all work, work, work.

We’re an informally professional team of experts who love what we do and the success we bring to our clients.

Some facts about the culture at Toast:

1. Staff work a flexible 4.5 day week on five days pay.
2. We have flextime for all staff.
3. All staff have WFH days.
4. We don’t do overtime or weekends; our day starts around 0930 and ends sharply at 1730.
5. All staff benefit from generous holiday allowances.
6. We’re working towards B Corporation certification.
7. Every year, we design and build a free website for a small local charity.
8. We offset our carbon footprint.
9. You can bring your dog to work.
10. We do more than build sites; we’ve launched WordPress plugins, AI apps and other interesting stuff.