About Practical Foundry

Practical Foundry builds websites and web applications for businesses, tradespeople, authors and musicians. We also build and run our own sites, and the engineering behind those is the same engineering our clients get.

Built on Experience

Practical Foundry was founded in November 2025 by Andrew Connor, who has worked in software development since 1995 — as a software engineer, and from 1998 to 2013 as an IT and technical manager.

That earlier work was database applications for in-house manufacturing, including the personalisation of plastic cards. One system took in card data, processed it to EMV standards for MasterCard and VISA, and drove the machines and printers that produced the finished cards. From 2013 the focus moved to bespoke web development at Cubiks, building applications in the occupational psychology field, and from 2017 to data engineering — the systems behind analytics and Power BI reporting. Cubiks was bought by PSI in 2019 and later became Talogy.

That is three decades of building systems where being roughly right is not good enough. The same standards apply here at a smaller scale: sites and applications that are fast, reliable and straightforward to maintain.

What We Build

Two strands of work, and each one feeds the other.

Our own content sites. Practically Clear, an alcohol-free drinks directory and online magazine, is the first of them. It pairs a large, structured catalogue of drinks with written guides on top, and every factual claim in those guides is either cited to a source or attributed to the brand making it. It is live, and you can go and use it today. It is also the working model for how we build a content site — robust data first, writing worth reading second — and the model is built to be repeated.

Websites for clients. For businesses, tradespeople, authors and musicians. That runs from a straightforward professional site through to something with more behind it: a quote calculator, a searchable catalogue, a dashboard, or a conversational assistant that can answer questions and run calculations.

The two strands share a codebase. The calculation, input handling and charting built for one are there for the other, which is why a client site can work something out and then explain the answer rather than just presenting information.

There is more on Practically Clear on the projects page, and anything we build after it will be added there as it arrives.

Based in Hampshire

Practical Foundry operates near Portsmouth in Hampshire, and works with both local and remote clients. If you need a new website, or want one of these tools built into the site you already have, we would like to hear from you.