About this site

How this site was made

Mike spent his career in assurance, so it would be odd to run a website that could not answer questions about itself. This page says where the pictures came from, what the site is built with, and what it does with your data.

The images

The portrait of Mike is a photograph of Mike. It was taken from a real portrait and lightly retouched using AI tools, in the way a photographer would once have retouched a print. It is a true likeness. Nothing about his appearance has been changed, added or invented.

The five wide images further down the page are AI-generated. The pallets, the earth-covered storage houses, the boardroom, the racking and the warehouse team are not photographs of real places, real events or real people. Nobody in them is a real person. They are illustrations, chosen to carry the mood of the work rather than to document it.

This matters because of what those images sit next to. The claims on this site are real: the £6.7bn contract, the £3.6bn of assets, Europe's largest munitions site, the assurance assessment moving from Limited to Substantial. The pictures beside them are not evidence of those claims and are not offered as evidence. If you want the evidence, ask Mike and he will talk you through it.

Defence sites are not photographed casually, for reasons that will be obvious. Using illustrations rather than real imagery is the correct answer to that problem, not a shortcut around it.

The typefaces

The site is set in IBM Plex Sans, with IBM Plex Mono for figures and dates. IBM released Plex under the SIL Open Font License, which permits anyone to use and host it. The font files are served from this domain rather than from Google Fonts, so that opening a page does not tell a third party that you were here. The licence text travels with the files.

How it is built

Plain HTML, CSS and a small amount of JavaScript. No content management system, no page builder, no tracking, no cookie banner. Everything on the page is real text, which means a screen reader can read it, a browser can translate it, and a search engine can quote it. The figures on the images are HTML text sitting over the picture rather than words burnt into the image file.

The site works with JavaScript switched off. The animation on the logo, and the sections that fade in as you scroll, are both switched off automatically if you have asked your computer to reduce motion.

Text contrast was measured rather than judged by eye, including where white text sits over a photograph. Every combination meets the WCAG 2.2 AA standard.

Your data

This site sets no cookies and runs no analytics script. It loads nothing from any other company. The only records of your visit are the ones the hosting company keeps automatically, and they are described in full on the privacy page.

Getting in touch

Anything on this page, or anything else, goes to mike@mikedempsey.co.uk.

Last reviewed 3 September 2026.