One office, on Cathedral Road, since 2012. The people who answer the phone are the people who write the code, and for a client in South Wales that is a short drive rather than a line on an invoice.
Green Arrow Consultancy is an AI agency and digital consultancy based in Cardiff, Wales, and Cardiff is the only office we have. We have worked from the city since 2012, building websites and production AI systems and running privacy, analytics and accessibility programmes for organisations in South Wales and for global brands in the USA, Europe and Asia Pacific.
Green Arrow Consultancy was founded in Cardiff in 2012 by Darren Tyler and has been here ever since. The registered office is Sophia House on Cathedral Road, in Pontcanna, a walk from Cardiff Central on one side and Bute Park on the other. Company number 12491770. That is the whole geography of the firm, and we would rather state it plainly than imply a network of offices that does not exist.
The practical effect on a project is smaller than most location pages pretend, and larger in one specific way. It is smaller because almost all technical work now happens over a screen share and a repository, whether the client is in Llandaff or Los Angeles. It is larger because when something goes wrong, and on a long-running digital estate something always eventually goes wrong, a South Wales client can be in a room with the person who wrote the code that afternoon. Not an account manager. The person.
The team is Darren Tyler as founder and chief executive, Carol Tyler as director, and Paul Knowlson on business development, with specialist help brought in where a project needs it. The about page has the fuller history: we started building websites, ended up running privacy and accessibility programmes for global consumer brands, and now build production AI systems on top of the same estates.
What this means for a budget. Work for organisations in Cardiff, Newport, the Vale of Glamorgan, Bridgend and Swansea carries no travel charge, because there is nothing to charge for. A quarterly review in person is a normal part of a retainer here rather than an extra to negotiate.
The same nine services are available whether you are ten minutes away or ten time zones away.
New builds and rescues of sites that have outgrown their original agency. WordPress, headless and bespoke, with Core Web Vitals, accessibility and consent handled during the build.
UK GDPR records of processing, cookie audits, consent platform work and the awkward job of making the tag manager match what the policy says. Osano and OneTrust are the platforms we deploy most often.
WCAG 2.2 AA audits using axe alongside manual keyboard and screen reader testing, with an accessibility statement that is accurate rather than aspirational.
Retrieval assistants, document AI and internal search, grounded in your own content and built to cite the document an answer came from.
Google Analytics 4 and server-side tagging configured so measurement survives consent and the numbers in the board pack are defensible.
We are often the specialist layer behind another agency, handling the privacy, accessibility or AI portion of a programme alongside it.
Every location page claims local knowledge. Here is a piece of it that matters if you operate in Wales: bilingual provision and digital accessibility are the same engineering problem, and organisations routinely budget for them as though they were two unrelated ones.
The Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011 created the office of the Welsh Language Commissioner and a system of standards. Standards are not a blanket law that lands on everybody in Wales. They are imposed on named organisations through regulations and a compliance notice, and fall into classes covering service delivery, policy making, operational matters, promotion and record keeping. The bodies affected are largely public sector: the Welsh Government, local authorities, NHS bodies, universities, national parks and others named in regulations. Service delivery standards are the ones that reach a website, and the recurring theme is that Welsh must not be treated less favourably than English.
Private companies are not generally subject to the standards. Many choose bilingual provision anyway, because their customers, their staff or their tender scoring care about it, and public sector procurement in Wales frequently asks about Welsh language capability even where no standard is imposed on the supplier. None of this is legal advice. We are engineers and privacy practitioners, not solicitors. If the answer changes what you sign, take proper advice or ask the Welsh Language Commissioner.
A bilingual site is not one website with a toggle. It is two content trees that have to stay in step, and every accessibility artefact exists twice. Two sets of alt text. Two sets of form labels and error messages. Two sets of link text, which matters because a screen reader user may pull up a list of links out of context. Two accessibility statements. Two sets of PDFs, which is where most public sector accessibility debt is buried. If your audit only tested the English tree, you tested half your estate.
WCAG 2.2 success criterion 3.1.1 requires the default human language of a page to be programmatically set, which means the Welsh version needs lang="cy" on the html element rather than inheriting lang="en-GB" from a template nobody revisited. Criterion 3.1.2 covers passages in another language, so a Welsh place name, a quoted phrase or an untranslated heading sitting inside an English page needs its own inline language marker. Get this wrong and a screen reader reads Welsh through an English speech engine, which is close to unintelligible for a Welsh-speaking user and is the single most common bilingual defect we find.
Alongside that sits hreflang, a search and discovery signal rather than an accessibility one, declaring the English and Welsh versions as alternates so a search engine serves the right one. The language switcher itself has to be a real link to the equivalent page, keyboard reachable, with a visible focus indicator, and labelled in the language it switches to. “Cymraeg” should be marked up as Welsh even when it sits on an English page, which is criterion 3.1.2 doing useful work in one word.
Welsh text is commonly longer than the English equivalent for the same message. Fixed-width buttons, tab bars, table headers and navigation designed against English strings break when the Welsh version arrives, in ways that fail WCAG 2.2 criteria 1.4.4 on resizing text and 1.4.10 on reflow at 320 CSS pixels. Test both languages at 200 per cent zoom and at 320 pixels wide before launch. Mutation matters too: a site search that only matches exact strings will miss the mutated form of a Welsh word, which users experience as a broken search rather than a linguistic subtlety.
Public sector bodies in Wales are also caught by the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018, which require conformance with the standard referenced by EN 301 549 and a published accessibility statement. Organisations selling into the EU have the European Accessibility Act to think about instead. Our accessibility service covers both, and on a bilingual estate we scope the audit as two trees from the outset so the number in the proposal is the real number.
Eight defects we find often enough on bilingual estates that they now form the first pass of an audit.
| Checkpoint | What usually goes wrong | What the fix looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Page language | The Welsh pages inherit lang="en-GB" from a shared template | Set the language attribute per tree at render time, and assert it in an automated test |
| Language of parts | Welsh place names and quotations sit unmarked inside English pages | Inline language markers on the affected span, checked during editorial review |
| Language switcher | A JavaScript dropdown that is invisible to a keyboard and sends everyone to the home page | A real link to the equivalent page, focusable, labelled in the target language |
| Cross-linking | No hreflang, so search engines pick the wrong version for Welsh speakers | Reciprocal hreflang for both versions plus x-default, generated rather than hand-maintained |
| Layout and reflow | Longer Welsh strings overflow buttons and navigation at 200 per cent zoom | Design against the longer language, then verify at 320 pixels wide in both trees |
| Documents | The English PDF is remediated and the Welsh one is not | Treat every document as two deliverables, or publish the content as HTML instead |
| Accessibility statement | Published in English only, and describing the English site alone | One statement per language, covering both trees, with real known issues listed |
| Content drift | Welsh pages fall months behind after launch and quietly become wrong | An editorial workflow that blocks publishing an English change without its Welsh counterpart |
Drawn from accessibility audits carried out by Green Arrow Consultancy. This is engineering guidance, not legal advice.
Five stages. The second is where most of the money is saved.
Half an hour, in our office on Cathedral Road or yours, describing the problem in business terms. If the honest answer is that you need a copywriter or a better search index rather than a build, you will hear that in the first meeting.
Before quoting anything we look at the current site, the analytics configuration, the consent setup and an accessibility sample. The brief and the actual problem are often different, and it is cheaper to discover that now.
Fixed price where the work is knowable, day rate where it genuinely is not, and a plain explanation of which parts are which. Travel outside South Wales is itemised separately so you can decide whether a trip is worth paying for.
Work lands in short releases you can look at, rather than a long silence followed by a launch. Privacy, accessibility and performance are checked in each release, not left as a phase at the end that gets cut when the date slips.
Either we manage the site under a retainer, or we document it and hand it to your team with the runbooks to operate it. A supplier who makes handover difficult is telling you something about the relationship.
The case against us, written by us. A supplier who cannot tell you what they are bad at has not thought about it.
South Wales organisations reasonably ask whether a Cardiff firm can run international work, so here is the record rather than a claim. In 2014 we took over more than thirty Energizer websites across the UK and Europe. In 2016 we ran a campaign across thirteen European countries. In 2017 sixteen Asia Pacific sites were added, taking the estate past fifty, and privacy work began in earnest around GDPR. In 2019 we mapped the digital assets of a Fortune 500 business across more than a hundred websites. By 2022 the managed portfolio had passed two hundred websites, roughly half the client base in the United States.
The mechanics of doing that from Cardiff are unglamorous. The United Kingdom sits between the American working day and the Asia Pacific one: a Cardiff morning overlaps with Singapore and Sydney finishing, and a Cardiff afternoon overlaps with the American east coast starting. Two real windows a day, without anybody pretending to be permanently awake.
The rest is discipline. Written handovers rather than meetings, so a decision made in Cardiff at four in the afternoon is actionable in Chicago at ten. Deployment windows agreed per region, because a Tuesday evening release in Wales is a Wednesday morning incident in Australia. Consent and privacy configuration set per jurisdiction rather than by one global template, since UK GDPR, the EU regime, the US state laws and the Asia Pacific regimes disagree in ways a single banner cannot resolve. Read how that played out on the Energizer estate. If your organisation is in London rather than Wales, the same delivery model applies, written up honestly on the London page.
Green Arrow Consultancy has developed and managed my websites for Healey Fox for over 8 years now. I have been delighted with his online media and website knowledge and skills, the great value they offer and the high level of customer service and care they have offered us.
Questions specific to working with us from Cardiff. The full FAQ covers pricing, security, privacy and ways of working in more depth.
Yes. Green Arrow Consultancy Ltd was founded in Cardiff in 2012 and incorporated as a limited company in 2020. The registered office is Sophia House, 28 Cathedral Road, Cardiff, CF11 9LJ. Company number 12491770, VAT 344486874, ICO registration ZA822868. There is one office and it is the one in Cardiff.
Yes, by appointment. Cathedral Road is a ten minute walk from Cardiff Central, so a morning meeting is realistic even if you are travelling in. We would rather come to your premises for a first scoping session, because seeing the systems people actually use tells us more than a slide deck does.
No. Roughly half of our client work sits in the United States, and we have run programmes across the UK, the EU, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, South America and South Africa. Cardiff is where the work is done, not a limit on where the clients are.
Not for meetings in Cardiff, Newport, Bridgend, Swansea or the surrounding area. Beyond that we agree travel in advance and itemise it separately rather than folding it into a day rate, so you can decide whether a trip is worth it. Most projects need far fewer trips than people expect.
We build and manage bilingual sites, working with your own translators for the Welsh copy. Our part is the engineering: parallel content models, correct language attributes, hreflang between the two versions, a language switcher that works with a keyboard and a screen reader, layouts that survive longer Welsh strings, and a workflow that stops the Welsh pages drifting behind the English ones.
That depends on whether your organisation has been given a compliance notice under the Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011. The standards are imposed on named bodies, mostly public sector: the Welsh Government, local authorities, NHS bodies, universities and others named in regulations. Private companies are not generally subject to them, although many choose bilingual provision anyway. We are not solicitors and this is not legal advice. If the answer matters to a contract, take proper advice or ask the Welsh Language Commissioner.
Yes, since 2014, when we took over more than thirty Energizer websites across the UK and Europe. The estate later included multi-country campaigns in France, Germany and Italy, a campaign across thirteen European countries, and sixteen Asia Pacific sites added in 2017. We run those estates on a normal Cardiff working day by making the handover asynchronous rather than pretending to be awake everywhere.
No. Cardiff is the only office. We work with London clients remotely and travel there when a meeting needs a room, set out honestly on our London page. Any supplier claiming a national network of offices is worth one search on Companies House.
Written and reviewed by the Green Arrow Consultancy team, led by Darren Tyler, founder and chief executive.
Tell us what is broken, or what you are trying to build. If it is a job for someone else, we will point you at them. If it is a job for us, you will get a scope with a number in it.