KnowBetter Creative —
Web & software studio — Est. 1999
Give us your tired, your slow,your vibe-coded apps, yearning to load,the wretched refuse of a site knocked offline.Send these — the dated, the broken —and we’ll make them shine.
The web is drowning in cheap.
Fill-in-the-blank website builders and AI keep pouring in more of the same. A site builder hands you a template. An AI prompt hands you the average.
There is no other business like yours, and it deserves a site that says so. That takes a human — one with experience, and the interest to find out what makes yours worth choosing.
That’s us: a small studio whose judgment comes from nearly thirty years doing the human part — sitting across from people, asking what they didn’t know to ask. Everything we design and build grows from those conversations.
Here, the people you talk to are the ones who build it.
Project spotlight
A beloved children’s musician needed a way to stay close to his audience.
Rick Charette wrote more than a hundred songs for children over forty years — about mud, sneakers, chickens, a loose tooth, and one alligator with a predilection for elevators. Generations of Maine kids grew up shouting “I Love Mud” back at him from a gym floor. He has stepped back from performing now, and his site became the only place to connect with him. It had been built in an earlier era of the web and didn’t reflect the artist.
The new site — So we built a new one from scratch, playful and friendly the way the songs are, right down to buttons as big and chunky as the ones on a child’s toy. Almost every song is there to stream, with its lyrics free to read and print, searchable by any word in the song — so a parent who only remembers absolutely, positively wild about mud still lands on the right song.
Playlists — We added an interesting take on playlists. A parent at bedtime needs quiet songs, one after another, and a parent on a long drive needs ones with big choruses the whole car can sing. So we grouped the songs by the moments families actually have: bedtime, bath time, the car, and too much energy that has to go somewhere.
Album pages — Every album got its own page rather than its own row in a list. We could have dropped each cover at the top and moved on. Instead each album has new art of its own, drawn with inspiration from the cover it sits with: an alligator in a fedora holding the elevator, a frog outside a motel at twilight, and the story of chickens on vacation. Twelve records, twelve pages, no two alike. And each one connects to his online store, so a parent can buy the album and download it on the spot.
Privacy — Children use this site, so we built it with no tracking scripts and no third-party cookies. Even the videos stay out of the way: they load in YouTube’s privacy-enhanced mode, and only once someone presses play. Rick still has his own private stats site, which we built for him: which songs get played and how far people listen, where visitors come from, and which pages lead to an order. Every number is counted anonymously, with nothing that identifies the families who visit.
Go and see it: rickcharette.com
Project spotlight
A coastal town in Maine needed a boat ramp that could run itself.
The town’s public boat ramp has no attendant. Whether a boat can launch depends on the tide, so the usable hours move every day. The ramp is locked with a code, and residents need the harbormaster’s approval before they can use it.
Diagram — how the tide sets the schedule
Off-the-shelf booking software doesn’t account for tides, a lock code, or a harbormaster’s approval, so we built a reservation app around those rules. A resident applies once, the harbormaster reviews the application, and the app emails them when they’re approved. From then on they book a half-hour slot from their phone, up to two per seven-day period, and the app shows them the lock code for that reservation. The app’s interface is simple by design. Booking a slot takes just three taps, because residents are typically using it while standing at their boat trailer.
When the boating season ends, the app switches off with the ramp, and it comes back each spring with a new set of tide data.
The people behind KnowBetter Creative
There’s a real person who responds.
A small studio headquartered in Spokane, with clients from coast to coast. When you contact us, chances are you’ll reach one of us:
KellyBuilding the web since 1999
RoyBranding, video, and logos
MelindaBilling and the details
No hand-off to juniors and no vanishing after launch. Here, you’re a client someone knows, not a ticket in a queue.
Most of our clients have been with us for years, through several redesigns and app revisions. One B2B client, with us since 2011, just got a complete rebuild, including a new back end that gives them one place to manage their site, process leads, and monitor their marketing performance.
Get in touch
What are you working on?
A tired site, something you built with AI that isn’t right, or an idea you haven’t started. Tell us what you’ve got and what it needs to do, and we’ll take it from there.
Got it! A real person will read this and respond, usually within a day.
KnowBetter Creative · Spokane, WA · (844) 566-9287