Hybrid office
The common answer. Everyday collaboration in Microsoft 365, the sensitive or heavy material on infrastructure you control. Most businesses land here once someone actually asks what lives where.
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Founder-led since 2013
It started with traders who couldn’t afford a dropped connection.
Knowledge Designs is not a call center with a local phone number. It is a small, senior team — led by someone who learned this trade keeping trading desks online, and has spent the years since keeping North Shore businesses running on the ground and in the cloud.
Where things stand
2010
Started
Keeping day traders and forex desks online, when a dropped connection cost money by the second.
40+
Businesses
Construction, accounting, trades and professional firms — several for the better part of a decade.
34
Cities & towns
Across the North Shore, Merrimack Valley and Greater Boston, plus remote clients nationwide.
5.0
On Google
From clients who were asked once, having never been asked in thirteen years.
Where we started
Fifteen years, four chapters
2010 – 2015
Traders, screens and uptime that paid by the second
It started with day traders and forex desks. That is an unforgiving place to learn this trade: a trader with six screens and a live position does not want to hear about a scheduled maintenance window, and latency is not an abstraction when it is the difference between a fill and a miss. Multi-monitor rigs, redundant connections, low-latency routing, and a phone answered while the market is open. If something broke, it broke while money was moving.
2015 – 2021
Six years building large WooCommerce stores
Knowledge Designs became an LLC in 2013, and from 2015 the work was dominated by large WordPress and WooCommerce builds — real stores with inventory, variants, shipping rules and payment flows, not brochure sites. Around 2016 the first offices began arriving by referral, and the two halves of the business started running side by side. Everything we now say about WordPress comes from six years of running it in production, not from the outside.
2021
The pivot toward IT and the office
In 2021 the focus shifted. The office and infrastructure work had grown into the larger, steadier half of the business, and it got the attention to match — managed IT, networks, security, backups and the private-cloud and colocation side that clients increasingly needed.
Today
Both halves at full capacity, and a team growing to match
The web work never went away; it now runs at full capacity alongside the IT side, which is the whole argument for one accountable team rather than three vendors. The team is actively expanding to keep pace — more hands for after-hours cover, larger projects and faster response, without giving up the thing clients actually value: you always know who has your account.
Continuity, not a bottleneck
You get a named lead — and a team behind him
In most IT companies the person who sells you the contract is not the person who fixes your server, and neither is the person who answers when you call. Here, Greg is your lead and does the work — so nobody has to look up who you are. Behind him sits a small dedicated team covering after-hours, holidays and larger projects, monitoring that runs around the clock whether or not anyone is awake, and every client environment documented in writing rather than in one person’s head. Coverage never depends on a single calendar.
On the ground and in the cloud
Four ways we build it
There is no single right architecture, which is why we run all four. Which one suits you depends on what your data is, how fast you need it, and what you are contractually allowed to do with it, not on what we would prefer to sell.
Private cloud, co-located
Your own hardware in a local datacenter I co-locate in — your disks, your tenancy, your keys, with real redundancy and power behind it. The answer when data cannot sit in a shared public tenancy.
Private cloud & servers →Full on-site
Everything in your building. Still the right call for operations that need local speed, hold data that should not leave the premises, or simply cannot depend on an internet connection to work.
Full cloud
No server room at all. Suits businesses that are already cloud-native, are moving offices, or would rather not own hardware. Fewer moving parts, provided the security and backups are set up properly.
How we work
Four things that do not change
Plain language, always. Jargon is mostly used to make simple work sound complicated and to make clients feel unable to question the invoice. Every invoice is itemized and every recommendation is explained in words you can repeat to your business partner.
We will talk you out of things. If a full managed agreement is more than you need, we say so. If your current provider is doing a decent job, we say that too. If your data belongs in Microsoft 365 rather than the private server you asked us to quote, you will hear it before you spend the money.
Security is not an upsell. Multi-factor authentication, tested backups, encrypted laptops and patching are the baseline, not a premium tier. Massachusetts law requires most businesses to hold a written information security program, and we will tell you where you stand on it whether or not you hire us.
Your accounts stay yours. Your domain, your licenses, your tenant, in your name. If you ever leave, you leave with everything and we hand it over cleanly. Providers who hold your domain hostage are the reason switching guides need to exist.
A deliberate policy
Why you won’t find a client list here
Most agencies open with a wall of logos. We keep client names off this website on purpose, and it is worth explaining why rather than leaving you to assume we have nothing to show.
Security, first and foremost. A public list of who a provider supports is a gift to anyone planning an attack. It tells them which businesses to target, what systems those businesses probably run, and, most usefully of all, exactly whose name to put on a phishing email. “Hi, it’s Greg from Knowledge Designs, I need you to approve this” is far more convincing when the relationship is published on the internet for anyone to read. Several of our clients hold financial records, client files and payment data. We are not going to advertise where those live.
Respect. A client’s business is their business. They hired us to run their technology, not to become marketing material. Being someone’s IT provider does not entitle us to put their brand on our website.
The exceptions are theirs to make, not ours. Where a client chooses to be named we are glad to say so — SDC Container LLC asked to be, and Steve wrote a public review under his own name. That was his decision, on his terms. It is never a condition of working with us.
What we offer instead is better anyway: references. A real conversation with a real client of similar size in a similar sector, arranged on request. Twenty minutes on the phone with a business that has used us for eight years will tell you considerably more than a logo grid ever could — and you can ask them the awkward questions, which is rather the point.
The same discretion extends to you. Hire us, and you will not appear here either — unless you ask to.
Where we do show our working
The work, in public
What we can publish, we publish in full — measured numbers, named where permitted, and the reasoning behind the decisions.
Case study · SDC Container LLC
Three booking systems, replaced by one
A Massachusetts dumpster company whose WordPress site ran three overlapping booking systems and still could not take an order. Orders up 58.7% and holding, with the whole build explained.
Measured · Web design
Rebuilding a WordPress site without WordPress
A real 32-page Elementor site measured against its static rebuild: 432KB of HTML down to 48KB, 35 scripts down to one, ten plugins down to none.
Compliance · Massachusetts
What 201 CMR 17.00 asks of you
Massachusetts requires a written information security program from most businesses holding residents’ personal data. What has to be in it, and the controls it rests on.
More in guides and insights — buyer’s guides, security, local SEO and what to ask any provider before you sign.
Fifteen years of design work
175+ websites. About 57 are still online.
175+
Websites built
Across fifteen years, for businesses of every size in and well beyond Massachusetts.
~57
Still live today
We don’t host or maintain all of them — plenty outlasted the contract, which is its own kind of compliment.
That second figure deserves the explanation, because taken cold it looks like a failure rate. It is not. Small businesses are not permanent. Owners retire. Shops close. Companies get sold and the new owner brings their own people. Some clients move to a different designer or marketing agency, which is entirely their right and occasionally the correct decision. Fifteen years is long enough to watch every one of those happen, many times over.
It is also not a client list. We do not host or maintain all fifty-seven — a good number of them are simply still running years after our part in them ended. We would rather report the figure that way than imply a book of work we are not actually looking after.
So we do not treat it as a scoreboard. What matters is the other side of the same number: the relationships that did last. The construction firm at eight years. The accounting practice at nine. The client of nearly five years we have still never met in person. Those are worth considerably more than a count of sites shipped, and they are the reason the business is what it is today.
We are proud of where we stand, and we value every one of those relationships accordingly — including the ones that ended well.
The other thing fifteen years buys you is a clear view of what has changed. The sites we build now are not the sites we built in 2015 — and the difference shows up the moment anyone measures them.
WordPress
60–85
Ours
98–100
Both bars scaled 0–100. The upper range is what we typically find when a business asks us to look at their existing WordPress or page-builder site — our own observation across those reviews, not a published study. The lower is measured on pagespeed.web.dev and can be checked against knowledge-designs.com or sdccontainer.com in seconds.
A small piece of history
The mark, drawn in 2012
Greg drew this himself in 2012, a year before the business became an LLC. It is an old-school creation — built in the graphics tools of the day, layer by layer, back when that was simply how you did it.
It has never been rebranded, never refreshed, never run past a committee. Thirteen years later it still says the thing the business is actually for: someone who does the thinking about your technology, so you do not have to.
Straight answers
Greg leads your account and does the day-to-day work, so the person who reads your first message is the person who knows your setup. Behind him is a small dedicated team covering after-hours, holidays and larger projects. What you will not get is an account manager relaying messages between you and whoever actually touches the system.
More directly than it sounds. Trading desks are the least forgiving clients you can have — no maintenance windows, no tolerance for latency, and a very short conversation if something is down while the market is open. Everything we do for an office now was shaped by that: assume it will fail, test the restore, answer the phone.
No. We run hybrid setups, private cloud on hardware co-located in local datacenters, fully on-site environments and fully cloud ones — because they suit different businesses. Anyone who recommends the same architecture to every client is selling a product, not solving a problem.
The honest question every business should ask a smaller provider, so here is the real answer. A small dedicated team provides after-hours and holiday cover and can pick up any account. Monitoring, patching and backups run continuously on their own schedule, independent of who is working. Every client environment is documented in writing — network layout, credentials, licenses, recovery steps — so nothing critical exists only in one person’s memory. And because your domain, licenses and tenant stay in your name, you are never locked in regardless of what happens.
On-site work covers 34 cities and towns within roughly 30 miles of Middleton. Remote support has no such limit — we support businesses across the country, including a client of nearly five years handled entirely virtually.
See the 34 cities and towns we serve, the SDC Container case study, or get a free 15-point IT health check.
Let’s have a conversation.
Prefer to pick a time? Book an appointment →
Or call (978) 885-1819 — if we’re on a job, leave a message and you’ll hear back the same business day.