I'm Billy Lewis.

I design and build websites in Laurens, South Carolina. I also run Umby Marketing, the agency I've been building for about six years.

Billy Lewis, owner of Umby Marketing

Here's what I actually believe. Most small-business websites talk too much and say too little. One clear offer, no clutter, loads fast. That's the whole philosophy. If a visitor can't tell what you do in five seconds, the design failed. Doesn't matter how pretty it looks.

On AI, I'll be straight with you: it's a tool, not a personality. I use it for the repetitive work. The parts that need a person stay with people. The moment a website starts sounding like a machine wrote it, something went wrong. Every site I ship has to read like the human behind it.

And marketing? It's mostly about being findable and being honest. I tell my clients the same thing I tell myself: say what you do in plain language, and be where people are looking. The agency's growth came from doing that, not from tricks.

Outside of work, I'm a husband and a dad of two, and I still drive for Uber some weeks. The agency and the family are why I do all of this.

Four jobs, one desk.

  • Web designer

    Custom sites with a point of view. Every page answers one question: what does this business want you to do next? Typography leads and the pages are fast.

  • AI engineer

    Systems that do a job. I put AI inside real workflows to clear the repetitive sorting and triage before a person touches it.

  • Software engineer

    The unglamorous backbone: the systems and plumbing that keep a small business running without a drawer full of subscriptions.

  • Founder, Umby Marketing

    My agency, Umby Marketing, has been running in the Upstate of South Carolina, serving Greenville, Simpsonville, Anderson, Laurens, and the towns around them. Everything above, aimed at local businesses that need the phone to ring.

Case studies

How I do the work.

I ship in four disciplines. Here's how I work in each, and what I refuse to do.

Websites people figure out in seconds.

I start every site from the visitor’s confusion, not from a template. The first question I ask is what the page has to do: usually get someone to pick up the phone or send a message. Then I cut everything that doesn’t serve that. If a section doesn’t help the visitor decide, it’s gone.

I’ll hand-code a site before I’ll fight a page builder. Builders are fine until the one day something breaks and you’re debugging somebody else’s black box. When I write the source myself, I control every pixel and every byte, and I can fix anything that goes wrong in the open.

My own agency site is the loudest proof I can offer: umbymarketing.com. It sits at the top of “marketing” searches in Laurens, and it’s built exactly the way I build for clients: heavy type and honest color, with nothing that doesn't earn its place.

Models wired into real workflows.

The AI system I know best is Jev, a fast and cheap gatekeeper model that scores and triages work before any reasoning model touches it. Deep thinking only kicks in where it counts. That split, a small model doing the cheap sorting and a big one doing the hard reasoning, is how I keep AI work fast instead of burning tokens on problems that don’t need them.

I route everything the same way in my automations: exact checks where the answer is exact, judgment where it isn’t. A deterministic test handles the things that can be tested, and the model handles the things that need reading between the lines. I won’t bolt an LLM onto a job a simple rule could do. That’s burning money for vibes, and I’d rather spend it where thinking actually pays off.

Boring code that survives contact with users.

I’ve shipped enough software to know that clever tricks are a liability. I build in clear modules with honest error handling, and I write every line for whoever has to maintain it six months later. That person might be me, and future-me deserves the same courtesy.

My test is simple: if it can’t survive a real user on a real Monday morning, it doesn’t go out.

Client case studies go here. Recent work is available on request. I don’t keep a public client list on this page, so this space stays honest until there’s work I can show.

Ask me for recent work

Sites that turn visitors into phone calls.

A marketing site has one job: move the visitor toward one clear action. I build pages around that single action and strip away the rest. Ranking matters too, because the best page in the world is useless if nobody finds it. I write and structure pages to be found, then push the visitor to act.

The proof is my own site. umbymarketing.com holds the top spot for “marketing” searches in Laurens, South Carolina, and it’s built exactly the way I build client sites.

The newest branch of this work is memorial websites: permanent, cared-for online homes for families. That service is fresh, so its case studies are still being written, but it runs on the same one-action discipline as everything above.

Let's talk about your project.

If you need a website or software that fits how your business actually runs, I'm easy to reach.

Email me about your project