Two builders, one harbor, a fixable problem.

The founding story

It started with noticing.

Spend enough time in the harbor towns of the New Hampshire seacoast — Portsmouth, Rye, New Castle, Hampton — and a pattern jumps out. The businesses are excellent: real craftspeople, real service, real community roots. Their websites are not. Slow to load, hard to navigate, last touched years ago, built by a vendor who charged agency prices and disappeared.

Hutson Jones and Gardner Thornhill kept seeing the same two failures: local businesses were overpaying for underwhelming websites, and almost none of those sites were positioned for the biggest shift in how customers search since search began — questions answered directly, by answer-driven tools, instead of pages of links.

So they founded Black Buoy: a studio that builds the sites these businesses deserve, prices them like a neighbor rather than an agency, and structures every one of them to be found in the way people search now — not the way they searched in 2015.