Secure by default, not as an upsell
Backups, updates and safe settings are part of the build. I have spent long enough on the other side of that to know what it costs when they are an optional extra somebody declined.
Durbanville, Cape Town — 33.9°S
Leo Liebenberg
Web design · AI & automation · Founder of Trevern Technologies
Most small businesses lose their evenings to the same work twice — chasing bookings, retyping details, sending the quote they promised on Tuesday.
I build the systems that do it instead.
The short version
Web design, AI and automation — built in Cape Town.
I design and build websites, and I build the automation that runs behind them: bookings taken on WhatsApp, reminders and quotes that send themselves, AI assistants that draft the reply and wait for a human to approve it.
I came up through security engineering rather than marketing, which is mostly why the things I build are fast, boring to attack, and still working a year later.
- Builds
- Websites, AI assistants, business automation
- Runs
- Trevern Technologies — founder
- Background
- Cybersecurity & vulnerability management
- Studying
- BSc Cybersecurity & Networking, Eduvos
- Based
- Durbanville, Cape Town, South Africa
- Writes
- Plain English. No jargon tax.
The part most people skip
AI & automation
A website brings the enquiry in. What happens next is where small businesses actually lose money — and it is almost always the same four jobs.
Somebody messages at nine at night and nobody answers until morning. A booking gets written on a pad and typed up twice. The quote you promised on Tuesday goes out on Friday, by which time they have two others. The invoice sits sixty days old because chasing it is the job nobody wants after a long day.
All four are automatable, and none of them need a person to be involved until the moment judgement is actually required. That is the line I build to: the system does the fetching, the matching, the drafting and the sending — a human approves anything it is not sure of.
The pattern is not new to me. Before this I architected automation that ran unattended every single day: pulling live vulnerability feeds, scoring them with exploit-probability data, matching them against the exact software versions on thousands of individual machines, opening a staged workflow when something real turned up, and using a large language model to turn all of it into plain English a business owner could actually read. Same shape, higher stakes. Small-business admin is an easier problem than that one.
The front door
Web design
Someone hears your name and looks you up on their phone, on mobile data, with one bar of signal. What loads in the next two seconds decides whether they call.
I write sites by hand as static HTML — no WordPress, no theme, no page builder sitting between your business and the person reading about it. The CSS is inlined, the fonts are self-hosted, and there is no database to break or get broken into. You can verify all of that by opening the source of any site I have built, which is rather the point.
That approach is not fashionable and it is not always the fastest thing to produce. It is the fastest thing to load, on the cheap Android handset most of your customers are actually holding, which is the only speed that pays you back.
- Static HTML
- Astro
- Cloudflare
- Core Web Vitals
- Schema / structured data
- Local SEO
- Accessibility
How I work
Four things I will not trade away.
AI that drafts, humans that decide
Assistants answer the questions you answer ten times a week and draft the rest for your approval. Nothing goes out unattended that a customer could hold you to. Automation is leverage, not abdication.
You own it, all of it
The site, the tools, the data, the client list — yours from day one and exportable any day. Nobody should keep your business by holding your website hostage.
Plain English, fixed price
One price in writing before anything starts. If the job turns out bigger than I judged, that is my problem, not an invoice you did not expect.
The studio
I run Trevern Technologies.
When the work is a job rather than a conversation, it goes through Trevern Technologies — the studio I founded, in Durbanville. Websites, WhatsApp and online booking systems, and the automation behind them, for small businesses across Cape Town and remotely anywhere in the world.
Trevern is a team of highly skilled engineers covering design, build, security and automation. You deal directly with the people doing the work — there are no account managers, and nobody hands your job to whoever happens to be free.
- Studio
- Trevern Technologies
- Base
- Durbanville, northern suburbs
- On-site
- Bellville · Brackenfell · Tyger Valley
- Remote
- Anywhere in the world
Speaking
I explain this stuff without the jargon tax.
Most technology is explained badly on purpose — a vocabulary problem dressed up as a complexity problem, usually by somebody selling something. I talk about AI, automation and online security the way I would explain it to the person actually paying for it. If that is useful to your group, get in touch.
Straight answers
Questions people ask.
- Who is Leo Liebenberg?
- Leo Liebenberg is a web designer and automation engineer based in Durbanville, Cape Town, South Africa, and the founder of Trevern Technologies. He builds websites, WhatsApp and online booking systems, and AI assistants for small businesses, and came up through cybersecurity and vulnerability management before moving into web and automation work.
- What kind of automation do you actually build?
- The admin that repeats. Bookings taken on WhatsApp or a website at any hour, confirmations and reminders that send themselves, quotes and follow-ups that go out on schedule, client details captured once instead of retyped, and AI assistants trained on a business that answer common questions and draft the rest for the owner to approve. The orchestration is usually n8n, self-hosted, with the language-model work on the Anthropic API.
- Do you work with businesses outside Cape Town?
- Yes. Websites, booking systems and automation are built and delivered remotely, so those clients can be anywhere in the world. Only on-site work is geographically limited — that covers Durbanville, Bellville, Brackenfell, Tyger Valley, Kraaifontein and the rest of Cape Town's northern suburbs.
- Why does a web designer have a security background?
- Because it changes what gets built. Coming from vulnerability management means defaulting to static sites with no database to breach, no plugin stack to keep patched, backups and updates included rather than sold as an extra, and personal information handled the way POPIA expects from the first line of code. Most sites get security bolted on after something goes wrong.
- Is it you doing the work, or a team?
- Client work runs through Trevern Technologies, which is a team of highly skilled engineers covering design, build, security and automation. You deal directly with the people building your job rather than an account manager, and nobody hands it to whoever happens to be free.
- How do I get a price?
- Describe the problem rather than the product and you will get a plain answer about the simplest thing that fixes it, plus one fixed price in writing before any work starts. Published price ranges for websites and booking automation are on the Trevern site.
Contact
Let's talk.
A website, a booking system, an assistant that answers the same question forty times a week — or just a second opinion on something you have been quoted for. Say what the problem is and you will get a straight answer.