Reintroducing Intracia

I've been looking forward to relaunching the site. It's now ready, and I can also show you what we've been building for clients who want to update their own websites.

The site

I launched my first company website with pastel shades and drop shadows all the way back in 1997 to show off my shareware products. In the decades since, I've had many roles at many companies, but I always find myself working on a website for someone, and often for myself too. My blog has long served not just as a place to write but as a platform for experimenting with new technology.

I'd like to say web development got easier over time, but new requirements and challenges kept arriving faster than the tooling improved. Sites had to meet technical and business requirements, be accessible and scale, all while the bar for content and visual design kept rising.

Developing and maintaining a good website became a significant effort.

So about 8 years ago I made the switch to static site generation. It eliminates the entire surface area for security while giving you performance and scalability at a cost that's close to free.

But there's a catch — there always is. Editing and adding content ended up behind a gate. The gate isn't really technical: changing a static site can take specialist knowledge of Git, Markdown and command-line tools. More on that below.

What we take on

Intracia has been operating in one form or another since 2014, and became a full-time consultancy in 2020 when we relocated to Guernsey, growing mostly through word of mouth and existing relationships.

We focus on four kinds of work, chosen for where our experience is strongest, though we're not limited to them:

Software development — applications and APIs, designed by someone who has done this at scale.
Web applications & sites — customer-facing apps and company sites, built end to end.
Data extraction & recovery — getting valuable data out of difficult and undocumented systems.
Developer & AI tooling — libraries, SDKs and internal tooling, plus the MCP servers and evaluation harnesses that decide whether an AI feature survives contact with production.

It's a short, focused list, so you're paying for experience, not for someone to learn on the job at your project's risk. We've done these things before, and we do them well.

The product

Here's where it gets interesting. I first imagined Intracia as a tool to make running a site more manageable. It was born of frustration at how much harder modern sites had become while I was working on xbox.com: privacy policies, accessibility, localisation, mobile, browser compatibility, speed, search ranking and more. All worthwhile, but all adding to the overhead of creating a great site — and to the time and cost of delivering one.

We'd solved many of those issues with our chosen stack, but some pieces were still missing, and that's where our new software-as-a-service (SaaS) product comes in.

At launch it's focused on the biggest pain point I still have today: editing the content of a static site.

I'd tried many "headless CMS" products — Forestry, Tina, CloudCannon — and evaluated a few others, but none had the approachability of WordPress. We'd solved performance and security by switching to a static site, but what we really wanted was something as approachable as WordPress, ideally with better guardrails to keep the content looking professional. We really don't need people messing with font colours, layouts and styles in the middle of their post.

Intracia solves these problems with clean, style-based editing that also understands the structured metadata of each piece of content: the job title on a job posting, the category and author of a blog post, the client name on a case study. Smart setup, with optional AI assistance, takes the complexity out of the day-to-day.

And it does all that without touching your existing static site pipeline. Your content stays in Git, your site stays with the host of your choice and your media stays in your own S3, R2 or Azure bucket. Intracia adds a mobile-friendly interface on top, so your whole team, and anyone else you want to hear from, can publish without learning your stack.

It works with Nuxt Content, Astro, Jekyll, Next.js and whatever Markdown, YAML, JSON or TOML content you already use. It integrates with GitHub today, with GitLab and Bitbucket planned, and tools for SEO and site consistency are on the way.

Intracia is currently in early access. You can try it without changing your existing build, and remove it if it isn't right for you. We're onboarding sites one at a time, refining the setup until a new site needs little or no help from us to get started.

If it sounds useful, join the waitlist. Tell us what you're running and we'll tell you what to expect.

What comes next

Building Intracia, and the tools, tips and techniques we developed along the way, deserve posts of their own. I hope to write more over the coming weeks and months, so stay tuned!

(Note that these posts are human-written, as are most of the pages on the site; AI helped with the privacy and legal terms and the product comparison grid. We're big fans of AI for computer-to-computer communication like coding, but we think that if you want a human to spend time reading what you have to say, you have to put the human effort into saying it.)

Thanks for reading

Damien