Ffeibr: a national fibre network, one accountable name

Ffeibr connects Wales: a publicly owned full-fibre network selling to businesses and the public sector. Its website lived on borrowed hosting under Transport for Wales, with no domain of its own, and it had to take Welsh as seriously as English, by law and by conviction. They chose one senior person on a fixed price over an agency team.

Three decisions shaped the build. Bilingual by architecture: every field in the CMS exists as an English and Welsh pair, translated by ffeibr’s own translator, and a publish gate makes it impossible, not discouraged, to publish a page with either language incomplete. Welsh first: written Welsh runs 15 to 20 per cent longer, so every layout was built against the longer language and nothing breaks in either. Static on the edge: the site is generated ahead of time and served from Cloudflare, so there is no server to attack and no database to patch. Hosting costs next to nothing.

What that produced is checkable. A first conversation at the start of July; a live site on 30 July 2026, cut over with zero downtime around the company’s live email, where one wrong DNS record would have bounced it. Lighthouse on mobile, measured 20 August 2026: 90 performance, 100 accessibility, 100 best practices, zero layout shift. When ffeibr’s IT asked what vulnerability testing had been done on the supplier, the answer went back the same day and was accepted as written. When the first press release arrived as a Word document, a bilingual news story was live the same evening, published through the gate by their own process.

The conventional shape for this scope is a project team and a quarter of the year, with most of the budget spent moving information between people. A Swper project is led by one senior designer with AI as the build partner, so the person who decides is the person who makes, and the fixed price buys one name accountable for all of it. Ffeibr’s team now publishes in both languages without a developer on call. The network map that grows out of Cardiff as you scroll was the bit Matt couldn’t resist.