- 20+ years professional development
- Elgin-based, working UK-wide
- Fixed-price proposals
- 90-day managed launch care
- PageSpeed 80+ on every build
- UK company & ICO-registered
- Cloudflare-protected
- Stripe secure payments
The background
The background
Gordon Duthie has spent 20+ years building and maintaining .NET and Azure systems — from small business sites to large-scale enterprise integrations. When you work with Smaoin, you work directly with the senior engineer building your system — no account managers, no hand-offs, no layers between you and the work.
Smaoin was founded in 2025 following redundancy from a large enterprise role. What could have been a setback became clarity — it forced real thinking about what kind of work actually matters, instead of just maintaining legacy systems without moving anything forward.
The name, Smaoin — Scottish Gaelic for “thought” or “idea” — reflects that: careful thinking first, then clean, practical engineering that solves the actual problem — not just the one that was described.
Get in touchThe problem that wouldn’t leave us alone
The problem that wouldn’t leave us alone
Across 20+ years of building systems, one thing kept coming up — the web is full of sites that are quietly broken from a security standpoint. Not dramatically hacked, just neglected. Running on outdated platforms, with dependencies nobody’s touched in years, no process when something goes wrong.
Most small businesses don’t even know. They built a site, it went live, and they moved on. Nobody told them it needed maintaining. That bothered us. A lot of the damage from web vulnerabilities is completely avoidable — not with expensive expertise, just with consistency. Updates applied when they’re released. Alerts reviewed when they fire. Someone actually paying attention.
Smaoin exists to change that — platforms built secure from day one, with ongoing monitoring baked in, not added later.
How we work
How we work
Years in large enterprises showed what doesn’t work: vague retainers, endless discovery, building what’s fashionable instead of what solves the actual problem. We don’t do that.
- Understand the actual problem, not the stated one
- Build for the long term — maintainable, testable, and observable
- Communicate plainly — no jargon, no hiding behind complexity