Smarter websites. Modern tools. Built for small businesses that do the work.
No more duct tape. No more thinking about having to deal with a hard-to-handle platform. No more using Facebook as your website.
Seeley Oaks Works is a one-person web development and AI tools studio based in Hayward, Wisconsin. I build modern, fast, and functional websites for small business owners who are tired of fighting with platforms that weren't built for them. The goal is to enable YOU to be able to share and show off YOUR products and ideas.
Long story short: I'm Ben. I've spent years working in and around small businesses — from running vacation rentals to managing marketing for local companies. I've built websites on just about every platform out there, fought with plugins, lost passwords, broken layouts, and watched businesses settle for a Facebook page because "it's easier." I got tired of it. So I started building something better.
Long story long: For years, I struggled with the same thing most small business owners do — trying to get a website that works, looks good, and doesn't cost a fortune to maintain. I tried WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, and a dozen other platforms. Each one came with its own headaches. Plugins that broke after every update. Themes that looked nothing like the demo. Editors that felt like they were designed to confuse you.
Location
Hayward, Wisconsin
Focus
Websites, AI tools & automation for small business
Approach
Modern tech, no fluff, built to scale
What I Am
A builder who helps small businesses get real websites — not templates held together with duct tape. I'll help you build it, and I'll teach you how to use it. I want you to own your web presence, not rent it from a platform you can't control.
What I'm Not
I'm not a marketing agency. I'm not a brand strategist. I don't do social media management. I build websites and tools — and I make sure it works and you know how to use it.
The plugins. Oh, the plugins.
And then there were the plugins. Oh, the plugins. Every time you needed a feature — a contact form, an image gallery, a booking system — you had to find a plugin. And plugins meant updates. And updates meant things breaking. And things breaking meant spending your Saturday night Googling "why is my WordPress site showing a white screen of death" instead of doing literally anything else.
Forget your password? Good luck. Locked out of your own site because you didn't update PHP? Classic. Paying $200/year for a theme that still doesn't do what you want? That's just Tuesday.
So what do most small business owners do? They settle. They use Facebook as their website. They put their menu on Instagram. They use a free Google Sites page that looks like it was built in 2008. And they tell themselves it's "good enough."
Meanwhile, they're spending hours building content on someone else's platform — content they don't own, on a platform they can't control, with an algorithm that decides whether anyone actually sees it.
Enter 2026. The tools available now are nothing like what we had even two years ago. AI can help you write content, generate images, build layouts, and automate tasks that used to take hours. Modern web frameworks are faster, lighter, and more flexible than anything WordPress ever offered. And hosting? You can deploy a professional website for pennies compared to what the old platforms charge.
A name borrowed from a quiet a-frame in the woods.
Seeley Oaks Works is inspired by our a-frame cabin in Seeley, Wisconsin. My wife, Amy, and I worked with a local builder to build it a few years ago — 700 sq ft of modern a-frame in the middle of 40 acres of quiet woods. A place where peace and solitude meet modern amenities, where the kind of thinking that leads to building things actually has room to happen.
Build you something real — something you own, something that works, and something you can be proud of.