Web development agency in Washington DC

Because Bruno designs and codes your site with one team, without handing development to a contractor you’ll never meet. Cofounder Léonard Chalvet is a developer himself, trained at École 42. You talk directly to the person writing your code, and that same person maintains the site after launch. Two years from now, they’ll still know why that button is there.

Bruno has no office in DC, so everything goes through our teams in San Francisco, on Pacific time, and Paris, six hours ahead of the East Coast. Check-ins land in your late morning, which is early in California and late afternoon in Paris. Designs and prototypes are reviewed online, comments and all. When a workshop really needs a room, San Francisco is about five hours away by plane.

Web development turns the screens drawn in web design into a site that loads fast and that your team can update. Web design settles the look and the user journey; development makes them sturdy, measurable and maintainable. Plenty of organizations hire two vendors for the two jobs and spend the end of the project refereeing. Bruno keeps both in one team.

Yes. For the Alaska State Archives, Bruno redesigned the entire interface within the constraints of a state government, and put the archival records themselves front and center. Celeres, which builds mission-critical software for space, defense and public services, got a new identity and a new website. Both are clients for whom reliability comes before flash.

Yes, and Bruno plans for it from scoping: Section 508 sets accessibility requirements for federal agencies’ digital content and for what they buy, built on WCAG criteria. Contrast, keyboard navigation and alt text are design decisions before they’re code. Retrofitting them after launch takes far longer. So if federal agencies are among your users, bring it up on the first call.

Bruno picks the tool based on who will update the site, not on what’s trending. For a brand site your communications team runs on its own, Framer or Webflow is plenty, and Bruno is a Framer Expert. When the site has to talk to other systems, React with a CMS like Prismic takes over. The most impressive stack isn’t always the one you still like three years in.

Bruno typically needs two to four months from scoping to launch, design included. Treat that as a ballpark: the number of templates, the integrations and how much content still needs writing all move it. In the public sector, the number of people signing off often weighs more than the code. We set the schedule at scoping, stage by stage.