All originals

Live

Sites by Panda

My website service for small businesses, where you see your own business as a site before you've even got in touch.

The Sites by Panda homepage hero: a builder where you type your business name and pick a trade, colours and type, with the site it makes shown beside it. Here a barber's name is typed in, the trade changes to a café and then a trades business, the colours and type change, the preview turns into a phone, and the name lights up as a neon sign.
Status
Live
Built
Website service + its own site
Stack
Next.js · GSAP · three.js
Since
Oct 2026

Why I started it

Most of what I build under AutomatedPanda is software, and a lot of businesses don't need software. A barber, a café or an electrician needs a proper website that says what they do, works on a phone, and lets people book where that matters. That's a different job from building a custom system, so I gave it its own service and its own site.

It still trades as AutomatedPanda and it's still just me. If a website enquiry turns out to need a custom app or an automation, it comes over to the studio next door.

The brief I gave myself

A lot of website services lead with a gallery of templates and "price on request". I wanted the opposite. Let people see their own business as a site before they've spoken to me, and put the prices on the page.

The site also had to be its own best example. If I'm asking a small business to trust me with their website, mine had better be worth scrolling through.

What I built

A hero you can try on. You type your business name, pick a trade, a set of colours and a typeface, and the site beside it changes to match, on a desktop or a phone. It's a starting point rather than the finished design, and everything you picked comes with you if you get in touch.

A street at night. One scroll down, the page turns into a street of shopfronts drawn in light. Panda Dev, my 3D mascot, walks along it as you scroll and talks you through each shop, and the last one has your business name over the door in neon. The real sites are in the windows, including the particle panda from this site's hero, running live behind the glass.

Prices said plainly. Two packages, Starter and Business, plus a calculator for the add-ons that gives you an estimate rather than a quote. The first five clients get founding prices, and the page says exactly what they go up to afterwards, instead of showing a made-up "was" price.

A contact page that lights up. Your shopfront sits there with its sign switched off, and it comes on as you fill in the form. When you send it, you get an email with your shop lit up and a PDF brief of everything you picked, and I get the enquiry in Panda HQ, the same place my software enquiries land.

Ownership by default. Every site is set up in the client's own accounts (domain, hosting and code), and once it's paid for it's theirs. Nobody ends up renting their website from me.

Behind it

It's built with Next.js, React and TypeScript, with GSAP for the scroll and the motion, three.js for Panda Dev, and Vercel for hosting. Panda Dev is a rigged 3D model that I generated and then fixed up in Blender, and he has his own small studio app for testing animations and accessories, like his headphones.

Before anything gets sent, every enquiry goes through Cloudflare Turnstile and a spam check, and whatever looks like a sales pitch is filed away in Panda HQ without a single email going out.

The outcome

It went live on 21 October 2026. The five founding places are still open, and it's live at sitesbypanda.com.