The Helmflux blog
Practical posts on design, websites, AI, marketing and running a small business. Written by the team who actually do the work, with real numbers and real client stories. No SEO filler, no AI-generated fluff.
Our manifesto. After 15 years in the creative industry, here are ten things we think it can do better, from owning your work to honest pricing and practical AI. Read where we stand.
Date-client-project-version. One convention that costs nothing, takes no technical skill and saves hundreds of hours over the life of a business.
Value pricing, subscription, retainer-plus-project. Three models that work, the AI race to the bottom and the conversation to have with clients.
Freelancers still win for one-off logos. For ongoing creative, a £495 to £1,295 a month subscription beats £3,600 to £7,200 every time. An honest comparison.
Claude, ChatGPT Plus, Anthropic's API and Claude Code stayed. Midjourney, Jasper and Notion AI went. The honest reasons for both lists.
A homepage is a door, not a brochure. The sites that convert best have three to five sections and one job. Cut the carousel, cut the clutter.
Three-year total cost of ownership, build, hosting, maintenance and the features gap. An honest breakdown from an agency that builds on both.
More variants, less impact. Why chasing volume is making ad accounts worse, and why three strong ads will beat twenty mediocre ones every time.
Most brand guidelines die as a 40-page PDF nobody opens. Here's the structure, folder system and quarterly review that keep a kit alive.
Drop your URL in, get a brand audit back in 90 seconds. No email gate, no upsell. Here's why we built it and what's in version one.
FAQ, lead qualification, knowledge base, social content, invoice categoriser. Real budgets from £200 to £1,200. Plus three that'll bite you.
All design briefs go through one channel. Not two. Not one per client. One. Missed briefs dropped from four a week to zero in two months.
Five signals it's time, a 30 to 60 day notice script and a warm handoff list. Every agency says the same thing afterwards: we should have done it sooner.
27 questions we run in a 45-minute kickoff. Covers logo, colour, typography, voice and workflow. By the end we know the brand better than most internal teams.
Seven fields, five minutes. Rolling this out dropped our first-round revisions from 62% to 37% and gave us 37 hours back a month.
£8k, 400 documents, one custom GPT. Saved the juniors eight hours a week and paid for itself in two months. What the money actually bought.
We target sub-2-second LCP on every WordPress build. Hosting, image pipeline, plugin audit and the critical CSS approach that gets us there.
From a half-finished Notion brief to a live, 94-scoring SaaS marketing site in 12 days. What we cut, what we refused to cut, day by day.
Default admin usernames, outdated plugins and no application firewall. Three fixes, none take more than an hour, and they stop 90% of attacks.
Forty prompts across content, research, editing and strategy. Free to copy, tested every quarter. The maintenance is the magic, not the prompts.
Five keyboard tricks we teach every new designer in their first week. Boring, repeatable, time-back-in-the-bank.
We officially opened our doors this year. Here's who we are, what we believe about creative work, and what we're building first.
In-house at £45k, freelancer at £46k, subscription at £9.5k. The full maths on when a design subscription pays back and when it doesn't.
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