Websites that bring customers in.Software that handles them once they're here.

For businesses still running on WhatsApp, paper and memory — workflow, staff hours, cash, rotas.

I'm Ali-Noor Razak. AR Labs is two things that belong together: web development and custom software. The site that brings the work in, and the system that handles it once it arrives — database, app, deployment, end to end.

Small businesses, whatever the trade. What I'm usually replacing is a group chat, a notepad and somebody's memory.

01 What it's for

Five things, and what each one actually means.

Every agency promises all of these. So here is what each one looks like in practice, specifically enough that you can hold me to it afterwards.

Save time The admin that eats your evening — rotas, hours, chasing people for numbers. Worked out once, properly, instead of again every week.
Stop money leaking No more £20 missing from the till and nobody able to say where it went. Cash and hours that still add up on Sunday night.
Make more money Capacity you already have but can't see: jobs quietly dropped, follow-ups nobody made, hours billed short because no one wrote them down.
Get more customers A site that loads fast, says what you do in ten seconds, and makes getting hold of you easy — built so search engines can actually read it.
Fix the workflow No more “whose turn is it”. One place the job lives, so the argument stops happening at all.

02 What I build

Two halves of the same job.

Websites Fast, clear and findable. Written for the customer deciding in ten seconds whether you do what they need, and built to work on a phone on bad mobile data — because that's where most of them are.
Custom software The part off-the-shelf won't do. Dispatch boards, staff hours, cash ledgers, bookings, stock — built around the way you already work rather than forcing you into someone else's.
The joins between them So the enquiry from your website doesn't get retyped into three other places by hand, and the numbers in one thing match the numbers in the next.

03 How the work goes

One person, the whole thing.

I design it, build it and run it — which means there is no one to hand off to, and nothing gets lost in the handover. Same for a five-page site as for a system your staff live in all day.

Work out what the job really is. Usually by watching how you work now, not by asking you to write a spec. The thing you complain about is rarely the thing that's broken.
Design it around the worst moment. Not the demo — 8pm on a Friday, hands full, phone going, everything happening at once.
Build it properly. Database, permissions, the app or site on top. Your data separated from everyone else's, and records that still add up at the end of the week.
Put it live and keep it alive. On the phones your staff already own. Shipping is the easy half; staying up is the job.

04 Case study

Sparky Study Notes

sparkystudynotes.co.uk

The problem

Trainee electricians on a Level 3 course get webinars and a very large regulations book. What they don't get is a written record — the diagrams off the whiteboard, the page numbers into BS 7671, the worked examples with the numbers the tutor actually used. So everyone rewrites the same notes badly, alone, at night.

What I built

A study site covering the whole course, free to use. Every webinar day is written up with redrawn diagrams and highlighted book references, taught again in a 15–20 minute video, and backed by a PDF. There's a 20-question test after each module with instant marking, practice exams, calculators for Ohm's law, volt drop and Zs, and an AI tutor that answers from the notes and the wider web, then points a student back at the section to revise.

Where it came from

It's my own product, and I'm a student on the course — which is the only reason the notes exist. Content, site, database and deployment are all mine, so it's a fair look at both halves of the work at once: it's a website people find and read, and an application with accounts, marking and a tutor behind it. Written as the course runs, shipped the same week.

Course covered7 modules, 2 intakes
Masterclasses9, with tests
Per teaching dayNotes, video, PDF, test
Price to studentsFree
StatusPublished as the course runs

A Sparky Study Notes day page: Basic Electrics, with a twenty-point contents list split across morning and afternoon sessions. — A teaching day written up — twenty numbered topics, morning and afternoon, each one linked and downloadable as a PDF. See it live →

The Ask Sparky tutor answering the question "why do we bond gas pipes?" with an explanation of extraneous conductive parts and touch voltage. — Ask Sparky draws on the course notes and the wider web, then points back at the sections to revise. The counter along the top is a fund students can chip into, which is what keeps it free to use.

05 Case study

Held back

There is a second one, and I can't show you it yet.

It's live, it's in daily use, and it handles real money and real deliveries. There are questions around it still being settled properly, and publishing first while asking afterwards isn't how I want to work.

It goes here when that's done. If you've been sent to me by someone who has seen it, ask me about it directly.

06 Getting hold of me

Tell me what the job is.

One paragraph is plenty — the site you need, or the thing that goes wrong most weeks and how you handle it now. I'll tell you honestly what I'd build, what I wouldn't, and where something off the shelf would do the job cheaper.

Or email me directly:

hello@arlabs.co.uk