Next.js in Glasgow
Next.js development for Glasgow public services and housing
A Next.js development company for Glasgow councils and housing associations. Services used on old phones and borrowed devices, where a form has to work without JavaScript.
- Working day overlap
- About five hours, three hours behind Ankara, the same as the rest of the UK
- Who buys here
- Local authorities, housing associations, social enterprises, universities and the engineering firms along the Clyde
- What that changes
- The audience is the general public rather than a customer segment, so the device and connection assumptions have to be the worst ones rather than the average
- Local specifics
- A tenant or claimant service is often used on a borrowed or ageing device, which makes a form that works without JavaScript a requirement rather than a purist position
Glasgow's public services are used by people who did not choose to be users.
A tenant reporting a repair, somebody applying for support, a parent filling in a school form - none of them picked the service, and none of them can go elsewhere if it is slow or confusing. That changes the engineering baseline in a way that commercial projects rarely have to think about: the assumptions have to be the worst plausible ones rather than the average ones.
The form has to work when nothing else does
This is the Glasgow requirement that most modern web development has quietly stopped meeting.
A service form built as a client-side component needs JavaScript to download, parse and execute before it will accept input. On a current phone that is imperceptible. On a five-year-old Android handset on a weak connection, or on a library computer with an aggressive content filter, or on a device where something failed to load for no reason anybody will ever diagnose, it is a form that does nothing when you press the button.
Built correctly, the same form posts to the server like any form has since 1995. A Server Action attached to a plain form element submits without JavaScript, the server validates and responds, and the page renders. JavaScript then makes it nicer - validation as you type, no full page reload, a disabled button while it submits - without being load-bearing.
That is the difference between a service that degrades and a service that breaks, and for this audience it is not a philosophical position. Server Actions are the mechanism, and the discipline is to write the form so the enhancement is optional.
Measure on the device people actually have
The second half of the same argument is the JavaScript budget.
Every library added to a page is paid for by the slowest device in the audience, and for a public service the slowest device is not a rounding error - it is a significant share of the people who need the service most. A bundle that costs forty milliseconds on a developer's laptop can cost two seconds on a handset that is three generations old.
So interactivity gets justified individually rather than assumed. A date picker, an address lookup, a progress indicator on a long upload - these may be worth their weight. A table of repair statuses rendered by React in the browser is not, because the server can send the same table as markup for nothing.
When a Glasgow build is the wrong answer
Worth saying plainly, because it is often true.
If what an organisation needs is some published information and a few forms, a properly configured content management system with accessible templates will serve its users better than a bespoke application with no maintenance budget behind it. Custom development earns its place when a service has state somebody returns to - a repair with a status, a rent account, an application in progress - because that is the point at which off-the-shelf tools stop helping and start resisting.
We would rather say that at the start than build something that is abandoned in three years. When not to use Next.js is the longer version of the same argument.
Commercially
Scope fixed in writing before work starts, priced per project. The country-level ground - UK data protection, consent, invoicing - is on the United Kingdom market page.
Invoiced by Codefacture Yazılım A.Ş. in Türkiye, in pounds by bank transfer, with no Turkish VAT because exported services are exempt.
