About Doce Design
Design that earns its keep
Doce Design has been building WordPress websites since 2017 — first from Maastricht, now from Amsterdam. We work with small businesses and independent professionals who need a site that looks considered, loads quickly, and keeps working without constant maintenance.
Every site is built by hand. No page-builder bloat, no forty plugins holding the thing together, and no framework runtime shipped to your visitors just to render a paragraph of text.
How we work
- Clean, semantic HTML — readable markup, correct elements, accessible by default.
- Hand-written CSS — a small design system of tokens, not a megabyte of utilities.
- Static where possible — pages served as flat files load fast and present far less to attack.
- Yours to keep — no lock-in to a proprietary builder you can never migrate off.
The Netherlands · Since February 2017
Hello — I'm James
I moved to the Netherlands in 2016, started Doce Design in Maastricht in February 2017, and have been designing and building websites for people who want something considered, fast, and genuinely their own ever since — based in Amsterdam since 2019.
I work with clients across the Netherlands and further afield, mostly in English — my Dutch is functional for reading and following along, but not yet client-ready, so on the handful of Dutch-language sites I've built the client supplied the translations themselves. The work spans academic institutions, conferences, consultancies, retailers, and individuals building a personal brand — everything from a clean brochure site to a twenty-four-site membership network with custom infrastructure behind it.
What has stayed constant is the approach: understand the problem properly, design something that fits it, and build it so it keeps working long after launch.
23+
Websites designed & built
Since 2019
Working from Amsterdam
3
Dutch-language sites delivered
The foundation
WordPress since 2017, done properly
Most of the work in the portfolio was built on WordPress, and built carefully — fully custom designs from Illustrator or Figma, implemented in Elementor and Avada rather than an off-the-shelf template, plugins built with AI tooling where a project genuinely needed something bespoke, multisite networks, membership systems, payment integrations, and peer-review portals.
That experience is exactly why I know where the platform's limits are. Every one of those sites is still standing, and clients on WordPress are still fully supported.
Where the work is heading
Lighter, faster, safer foundations
More and more clients want a site that loads instantly, costs less to run, and presents nothing public for an attacker to find. So alongside WordPress I now build fully static sites — with tools like Astro, Webflow, and Instatic — that ship as flat files with no public-facing CMS or login screen to attack in the first place.
Some clients still want to edit their own content, and that's fine — where it matters I run a locked-down CMS that is never exposed to the public internet: no public URL, no open login page, access limited to specific IP addresses through a tool like Tailscale.
For clients who want it, I handle the migration off WordPress end to end: same content, same brand, a fraction of the maintenance — this site is a working example, migrated the same way, and learndutch.com is another. For clients who don't, nothing changes.
Behind the lens
Photography
Alongside the studio I run a busy photography practice, and it has grown into a genuine second string to the business rather than a hobby on the side.
It feeds directly back into the design work. Shooting properly teaches you composition, light, and how to make an image earn its place on a page — which is why the sites I build tend to treat photography as part of the design rather than decoration dropped in at the end. Clients frequently get both from one place: the site, and the images that make it look like something.
Thinking about your next site?
Whether you are starting fresh, refreshing something tired, or wondering what life after WordPress looks like — I would be glad to talk it through.
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