In cable since 2008. Building websites since 2010.
Empyria is a one-person web design studio in Wichita, Kansas, working nationally for infrastructure contractors. It is run by Darrel Dixon, who has been around the cable industry since 2008 and building websites and WordPress since 2010. Every project is designed, built and maintained by the same person.
Those two dates are the whole reason this studio exists, and for sixteen years they had nothing to do with each other. One was the industry I worked in. The other was the thing I was good at. They stayed in separate boxes until 2024, when I started doing marketing and web design specifically for contractors and realized how much of what I already knew nobody in that room had.
A web designer can learn a sector. Most do, and some do it well. What is harder to fake is having sat on the other side of it, wanting a subcontractor to look real enough to shortlist, or trying to get a splicer to finish an application before the end of a shift.
So Empyria is not a general studio that also takes infrastructure work. It is the thing those two dates add up to.
Two threads, and the year they met
Neither of these was a plan. They were just the two things I kept doing.
- 2008
The cable industry
Around it and working in it since. Long enough to know what a service territory argument sounds like, how a crew gets staffed, and why the schedule slips. None of that felt like it had anything to do with websites at the time.
- 2010
Web design and WordPress
Sixteen years of it, through every fashion the industry has been through: the theme marketplace, the page builder boom, the framework of the month. The main thing that period taught me is how much of what gets sold as progress is a way of shipping faster rather than better.
- 2024
Contractor marketing
The year the two threads met. Working on marketing and web design specifically for contractors, it became obvious how much sector knowledge a generalist has to guess at, and how visibly the guessing shows on the finished page.
- 2026
Central Plains Communications
Opened in February, in Nebraska. A cable and fiber contractor, and the sharpest education available in what these websites actually have to do, because every mistake on it is one I pay for rather than hand over.
- Now
Empyria
One person, one project at a time, for the companies that build infrastructure. The studio is new. What is behind it is not, which is a distinction I would rather make plainly than paper over.
Why it is one person, and why it will stay that way
Because the thing clients pay for is judgment, and judgment does not survive a handoff. A studio that grows past one person starts selling the founder and delivering someone else. I would rather take four projects a year and be on all four than take twenty and be on none.
This is not a stage I am passing through on the way to an agency. It is a decision about what the work is worth doing at, and it is the reason for the constraints elsewhere on this site: one project at a time, a calendar that is real, a price that reflects a person rather than a pipeline.
It has an obvious cost and I would rather name it than let you discover it. I cannot take your project next Tuesday. I cannot promise someone awake at two in the morning. If either of those is a requirement, you need a team, and I will say so on the first call rather than sell you a version of me that does not exist.
Four things I believe about this work
Specifics beat adjectives
"Quality craftsmanship since 1987" is on every contractor site in the country and it persuades nobody. Bonding capacity, EMR, footage completed, the counties you cover: those persuade, because they can be checked. Most of my job is getting the specifics out of people who assume they are boring.
The people doing the work explain it best
I write from interviews with the estimator, the foreman, the person who has answered the phone for nine years. A marketing brief tells you what a company wishes it sounded like. Twenty minutes with a foreman tells you what it actually does, in language a buyer already trusts.
Slow is a decision somebody made
No site is slow by accident. It is slow because a theme was purchased, a builder shipped its whole runtime, or a font was loaded from someone else's server. Every one of those was a choice to save an afternoon, and your visitors pay for it every day afterward.
Owning the businesses changed how I build
When you hand a site over, the mistakes leave with it. When you keep it, you find out in month eight which decisions were clever and which were just fashionable. That feedback loop is the most useful thing I have, and it is the reason I am cautious about anything that has to be renewed.
Four businesses, and I own all of them
A cable and fiber contractor, an apparel storefront, an independent game studio, and a band. They are not a client list and the portfolio says so on its first line. What they are is four sites I have had to live with rather than launch and leave, which is a different and in some ways harder test.
If you want a studio that has already done your industry eleven times, that is a reasonable thing to want and I am not it yet. What I can offer is the one sector I know from the inside and a track record you can inspect rather than take on trust.
See all four projectsWichita, Kansas, working nationally
The studio is in Wichita. The work is not especially local and does not need to be: the whole process runs on calls and a shared document, and I have never needed to be in the room to do it well. Central Plains is in Nebraska, which is a fair illustration.
Being somewhere real still matters, though, and not for search reasons. A studio with no address is a studio you cannot picture, and this is a business where people want to know who they are dealing with before they send money.
Monday to Friday, nine to five Central. Email reaches me faster than anything else.
Now you know who you would be working with.
Thirty minutes, no deck. I ask what the site actually has to do; you ask whatever this page did not answer. If it is not a fit you will hear that on the call.