Web design in Stevenage.

A studio you can actually visit

The studio is in Stevenage, so on-site meetings are available by appointment. Kickoffs and workshops can happen at your office instead — useful when the people who know the business best aren't the ones who'll be emailing back and forth. Every project is delivered directly by the founder, Shaun Dower, so the person you meet at the briefing is the person who designs and builds the site.

That matters more than it sounds. A lot of what makes a website work isn't in the brief — it's the thing the owner says twenty minutes into a conversation, when they explain why customers actually pick them over the firm down the road. Being able to have that conversation in a room, over a coffee, tends to produce a better site than a form submission and a template.

How a project runs, start to finish

Four stages, from first conversation to a live site. A concrete timeline with milestones is agreed after the briefing call, so you know what happens when — and what's needed from you at each point.

1. Strategy

It starts with a briefing call — in person in Stevenage if that's easier, or remote. The goal is to define what the site is actually for: who it's talking to, what a good outcome looks like, and what's in scope. That call is where the goals, the audience and the scope get pinned down. You come away from it with a fixed price and a timeline, before any work starts.

2. Design

Custom design and UX — the layout, the structure and the way the site reads on a phone as well as a laptop. Not a template with your logo dropped into it. This is the stage with the most back-and-forth, and the one where feedback speed makes the biggest difference to how quickly the project finishes.

3. Build

A responsive, high-performance build. The default stack is modern HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with React or Next.js where a project genuinely needs it. Speed, responsive behaviour, SEO/AEO foundations and long-term maintainability are planned in from the start rather than bolted on afterwards — which is what keeps a site cheap to run in year three.

4. Launch, care and SEO

The site goes live with its technical SEO setup and structured data already in place. After that, an optional monthly care plan keeps it maintained, and a managed SEO retainer works on search visibility over time. Neither is compulsory, and neither is bundled into the build price without you asking for it.

A focused website usually takes 4–6 weeks end to end, depending on scope, how ready your content is, and how fast feedback comes back. Content readiness is the single biggest variable — a project where the copy and photos are waiting at the start moves considerably faster than one where they're written as it goes.

Local roots, wider reach

Being in Stevenage is a convenience, not a boundary. Projects run across Hertfordshire, UK-wide, into Europe and fully remote — plenty of clients are never met in person and it makes no difference to the work. So a Stevenage address gets you the option of face-to-face without limiting who Dower Digital takes on, or narrowing the standard of the build.

It also means no pretending to be a big agency. One founder, a small number of projects at a time, and a fixed price agreed after a briefing call — the same way every project runs, local or not.

Face-to-face is easiest for businesses in Stevenage itself, but the surrounding Hertfordshire towns are a short drive — Hitchin, Letchworth, Knebworth, Welwyn Garden City and along the A1(M) corridor. If getting in a room early makes the project run smoother, that's on the table; if a video call is simpler, that works just as well.

What it costs

Website builds start from £1,000 as a one-off. Larger or more complex builds are scoped individually at the briefing stage — but they're still quoted as a fixed number, not an hourly rate with an estimate attached.

There is no hourly billing and no hidden cost. The price agreed after the briefing call is the price. If the scope genuinely changes partway through — you decide you want a booking system that wasn't in the original brief — that change is quoted and agreed before any work starts on it. You are never presented with a bill you didn't see coming.

After launch there are two optional monthly options, and they're separate from the build:

Care plans cover managed hosting and domain, updates and small changes, security, SSL and backups, and priority support — one place to go when something needs attention rather than three separate suppliers. SEO retainers cover keyword and competitor strategy, on-page optimisation, technical SEO and content, and monthly reporting.

Services for Stevenage businesses

Three things, whether you're up the road or across the country:

Custom websites designed and built from £1,000, monthly care plans to keep them running from £100/month, and managed SEO retainers to get found locally and beyond from £450/month.

Every build ships ready for both kinds of search. Traditional SEO — clean structure, fast pages, structured data — plus AEO, which is making the site legible to AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews. Increasingly, a local customer looking for a supplier asks an assistant rather than scrolling a results page, and a site that can't be read properly by one simply doesn't come up. Both rest on the same foundations, and both ship as standard rather than as an upsell.

One person, not an account team

Most studios competing for the same work in Hertfordshire present as agencies — a team, a process, an account manager between you and whoever is actually doing the work. Dower Digital is one person: Shaun Dower, founder, developer and designer in one. Only a small number of projects run in parallel, deliberately, to protect the quality of each.

The practical difference is that there is nobody to relay a message through. When you ask why something is built the way it is, the answer comes from the person who built it. When you want a change, it doesn't queue behind an internal handover. And when a briefing conversation surfaces something that changes the plan, the plan changes that day.

The trade-off is capacity, and it's worth being straight about it: a one-person studio takes on fewer projects than an agency with a team, so the calendar is genuinely finite. If the timing matters to you, it's worth asking early.

Common questions from local businesses

More answers on cost, technology, hosting and support are on the full FAQ page.