Booking new projects · Houston, TX & remote
Travis Potter
Founder & lead developer
Short & Stout Studios designs and develops websites, web and mobile apps, and custom software for growing businesses. From the first sketch to launch day and beyond, your project stays with the developer who built it.
Selected work
Every project here is live, in use, or on sale. Client sites for Houston businesses, products I run myself, and a game on Steam.
Mobile first
Most of your customers meet you on a phone. Every site starts there, then grows into the desktop. Drag or swipe through the real thing.
What I build
Pick the one that sounds like your problem. Most link to a project where I’ve already solved it.
01
A site that loads fast, ranks for what your customers search, and turns visits into quote requests. Built by hand, not dragged out of a template.
See it in Stack Haus Movers
02
Accounts, dashboards, payments, real-time updates and the backend behind them. One person who understands the whole thing, from database to button.
See it in Aux'd
03
Multiplayer backends, matchmaking, desktop apps and Steam releases. The hard, stateful work most web shops avoid.
See it in Gridhammer
04
The weekly spreadsheet chore that eats a day, turned into a flow that runs itself. AI only where it earns its cost.
Security
I spent eleven years in infrastructure and IT security operations, patching fleets and chasing vulnerabilities. Every site and app I build ships with the protections below, at no extra cost.
SSL certificates that renew themselves, forced secure connections, and HSTS so browsers never fall back to plain HTTP.
A strict content security policy plus clickjacking and sniffing protection, so injected scripts have nowhere to run.
Spam traps, rate limits, origin checks and server-side validation on every form. Bots get a polite nothing.
Passwords and API keys live outside the web root on the server, never in the code or the browser.
Every site runs under its own server account with its own SSH key. No shared logins, no passwords in email.
Each deploy snapshots the live site first, so a bad change rolls back in minutes, not days.
Hashed passwords, encrypted third-party tokens, and roles so people only see what they should.
Dependencies and server patches kept current on care plans, with uptime checks that tell me first.
Already have a site? I can review it for these same gaps and fix what I find. Ask for a security check
Search & SEO
Every site launches search-ready and stays that way. Here is exactly what gets set up, where it gets sent, and what happens each time your site changes.
Every page is written and coded for what your customers actually search.
Search engines get a clear map of the site and clear rules for reading it.
At launch the site is registered and sent to the engines directly, not left to be discovered.
Search isn’t one-and-done. Every change is re-announced, and problems get caught early.
Sent to and read by
Why “Short & Stout”?
I’m a little teapot, short and stout. The nickname stuck, and so did the studio.
I’ve spent eleven years keeping servers alive for IBM Cloud and enterprise security teams. Through Short & Stout I build the things that run on them: client sites for Houston businesses, a music social network, a webcam tabletop platform and a game on Steam. Off the clock I DJ around Houston, so I build for real rooms full of real people.
The longer storyHow it works
No account managers and no hand-offs. You talk to the person writing the code.
A 30-minute call, then a one-page brief and a fixed price you approve. No surprises later.
A private staging link in week one. You watch it fill in and comment as it goes.
Deployed on your domain with SSL, backups and monitoring. You get the keys and the docs.
Optional monthly care for updates, uptime and small changes. No lock-in.
Get a number
Pick one to open the quote builder. You will see a realistic starting range in about a minute, before you talk to anyone.
