# The proof is in the harbor.

> Client work and case studies from Black Buoy, a web design and development studio on the New Hampshire seacoast. First launch: Rochester Main Street, downtown Rochester's nonprofit.

The first berth in our harbor is filled: Rochester Main Street is live with the full Black Buoy treatment. And this site is still exhibit A, built exactly the way we build yours.

## This website is our first portfolio piece.

We hold ourselves to a simple standard: never ship a client anything we wouldn't ship ourselves. So blackbuoy.net is built with the full Black Buoy treatment: the same design care, the same technical foundations, the same answer-ready structure we sell.

View the source. Run it through a speed test. Ask a modern search tool about web designers on the NH seacoast. That's the product.

- **Hand-built, no template**: Custom design and clean semantic code. No page builders, no bloat.
- **Fast by construction**: Minimal scripts, optimized assets, excellent Core Web Vitals out of the box.
- **Answer-engine ready**: Structured business data, FAQ markup, and answer-first copy on every key page.

## Case study No. 1: Rochester Main Street, a downtown nonprofit rebuilt to run itself.

Rochester Main Street is the Main Street America nonprofit behind downtown Rochester, New Hampshire's events, promotions, and revitalization work. Their previous site had aged out: slow to load, dated to look at, and dependent on outside help for every update. That's a real problem for a volunteer-driven team that publishes events year-round.

Black Buoy designed and hand-coded a replacement from scratch: an events hub with a live homepage ticker, pages for volunteering, partners, and downtown advocacy, and a simple editor so volunteers publish events and announcements themselves. Every save goes live automatically in about two minutes, no developer in the loop.

The new [rochestermainstreet.org](https://rochestermainstreet.org) scores a perfect 100 for accessibility, best practices, and SEO in Google's Lighthouse, loads in under two seconds even on Google's throttled mobile test, and gets updated daily by the people who actually run downtown Rochester.

- **The client**: Rochester Main Street, the Main Street America nonprofit for downtown Rochester, NH.
- **The problem**: An aging website the volunteer team couldn't update without waiting on a developer.
- **The build**: Custom web design and hand-coded development: an events hub, volunteer and partner pages, and self-service publishing with automatic deploys.
- **The result**: Perfect Lighthouse accessibility and SEO scores, sub-two-second mobile loads, a 148% lift in Google search impressions within three weeks of launch, and a team that publishes its own news.

## Measured results: twenty-three days in, search already moved.

The new rochestermainstreet.org went live on July 21, 2026. Here is what Google Search Console shows for the first three weeks after launch, compared with the months immediately before.

- **+148%**: Average daily impressions in standard Google search results: 126 before launch, 312 after.
- **+231%**: Average daily appearances in answers from LLM assistants: 11 before launch, 35 after.
- **+87%**: Average daily clicks from Google search to the site: about 5 before launch, about 9 after.

Source: Google Search Console for rochestermainstreet.org. Daily averages for July 21 – August 12, 2026, the first 23 days after launch, compared with May 13 – July 20 for standard search and May 18 – July 20 for LLM assistants.

## Launched from our harbor.

Design, build, and the measurable results that followed.

### Rochester Main Street

Nonprofit · Rochester

Full redesign for downtown Rochester's volunteer-driven nonprofit. Events, volunteering, and downtown info on a fast new site the team updates themselves. Search impressions up 148% within three weeks of launch.

[Visit the site](https://rochestermainstreet.org)

### Case study in progress

Coming soon

Design, build, launch, and the search results that followed, documented start to finish.

### Results worth reporting

Coming soon

We measure what we build (traffic, visibility, and inquiries) so every case study here comes with numbers.

## Want to be case study No. 2?

Founding clients get our sharpest pricing, our fullest attention, and a permanent spot on this page.

[Claim Your Berth](https://blackbuoy.net/contact)