A small business website has one job: turn a stranger who searched for what you do into an enquiry. Most fail at it slowly and quietly. They take four seconds to appear on a phone, bury the phone number two scrolls down, and read like they were written to fill the space rather than to answer a question.
A hand-coded site, designed around what your customers are actually trying to find out before they call you. No page builder, no theme with forty plugins keeping it upright, no cookie banner arms race.
The homepage of this site is a reasonable sample of the standard. It ships as a single request with the critical CSS inlined and the fonts preloaded, and it renders on a mid-range Android phone before most competitor sites have finished their first redirect.
Speed gets treated as a developer's hobby horse. It is not. A visitor on a train with two bars will abandon a page that takes five seconds, and you will never know they existed because they never reached the page that counts your analytics.
We build static-first and host on Cloudflare's edge network, so pages are served from a machine near the visitor rather than a shared server in a datacentre somewhere. Images are converted to WebP and sized properly. Scripts that block rendering are removed or deferred. None of this is clever, it is just done, which is more than most sites can say.
A site that nobody can find is an expensive business card. Every build ships with the search foundations in place from day one rather than sold back to you as a separate retainer six months later: clean heading structure, page titles written for humans and search engines, structured data so Google understands what your business is and where it operates, a working sitemap, and social cards so your link looks like something when it is shared.
If you want the ongoing work as well, that is covered on the technical SEO page.
We agree what pages exist and what each one has to prove before anyone opens a design tool. This is the part that decides whether the site works.
You see the real thing in a browser, on a phone and on a laptop, rather than a flat picture of a website that behaves differently once built.
Hand-coded against the agreed design, on a staging URL you can check at any point.
Domain, hosting, redirects from the old site so you keep your existing rankings, and Search Console set up properly.
We are based in Cheshire and a good share of our clients are within an hour of us: Chester, Warrington, Northwich, Macclesfield, Crewe, and across into Manchester and Liverpool. That matters less than it once did, because most of the work happens over video calls and a shared staging link. It does mean we can spend a morning in your office at the start of a project watching how the current process really works, which is usually where the requirements you did not think to mention turn up.
We work with businesses anywhere in the UK. If you are further away, nothing about the process changes except that the first meeting is on a screen.
A small business site of five to eight pages usually falls between two and five thousand pounds depending on how much design and copywriting is involved. We quote a fixed price up front against an agreed page list.
Four to six weeks is typical, and the slowest part is almost always waiting for content and photography from your side rather than the build itself.
Yes, if you want to. We can wire up a simple editor for the pages that change often and leave the rest as code. Plenty of clients find it easier to email us a paragraph, which is included in a retainer.
Not if the migration is done properly. We map every old URL to its new equivalent and set permanent redirects before launch, so existing rankings and any links pointing at your old pages carry across.
Not by default. For most small business sites it adds a maintenance burden, a security surface and a speed penalty for no benefit. If you have a specific reason to need it, say so on the call and we will give you a straight answer about whether it fits.