Custom website design & development.

What's included

Every website build covers the work that actually moves the needle — strategy through launch, with nothing important left as an "extra".

What each of those actually means

Every studio lists roughly the same words on a services page. Here is what they mean in practice, and why each one is in the build rather than sold on afterwards.

Strategy and UX

Deciding what the site is for before deciding what it looks like. Who it is talking to, what you want them to do, and what has to be on the page for them to do it. This is the stage that determines whether the finished site sells anything, and it is the one most often skipped — which is how businesses end up with a good-looking site that generates nothing.

Custom design

The layout, typography and structure are designed for your business rather than adapted from a theme bought off a marketplace. That matters commercially as well as aesthetically: a template makes the same promises for a bakery and an accountancy firm, so it can't emphasise the thing that actually makes your customers choose you.

Responsive build

The site is built to work across devices rather than designed for a desktop and squeezed down to fit a phone afterwards. Most people will see your site on a mobile first — for many businesses it's the large majority — so the phone layout is treated as a primary design, not a fallback.

Performance and Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are Google's public measures of how a page actually feels to use: how fast the main content appears, how quickly it responds, and whether things jump around while loading. They're checked on mobile as well as desktop. Speed isn't vanity — a slow page loses visitors before they read anything, and Google knows it.

SEO, AEO and structured data

The foundations that make a site findable ship with the build: clean structure and headings, correct titles and descriptions, a sitemap, and structured data — a machine-readable summary of what your business is, what it sells and what it charges, embedded in the page. That last part is what lets Google show rich results, and what lets AI answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity describe your business accurately instead of guessing from your copy.

This is the foundation, not ongoing search work. It means the site launches able to be found and understood. Actively competing for specific search terms over time is what a managed SEO retainer does, and it is bought separately.

How it works

It starts with a briefing call — in person if you're a business in or around Stevenage, or remote anywhere else. After it, you get a fixed price and a concrete timeline with milestones — no hourly billing and no hidden cost, so you know the number before anyone starts working. A focused website usually takes 4–6 weeks, depending on scope, content readiness and how fast feedback comes back.

During the build you deal with one person throughout. There is no account manager relaying messages, so when you ask why something works the way it does, the answer comes from whoever built it — and when feedback changes the plan, the plan changes that day rather than after an internal handover. Only a small number of projects run in parallel, deliberately, which is what makes that possible.

Custom build or a website builder?

A fair question, and the honest answer is that a website builder is genuinely the right call for some businesses. If you need a presence online, your requirements are simple and budget is the binding constraint, a builder will do it faster and cheaper than any studio.

Where builders struggle is everything after that. They carry the weight of the code needed to support every possible layout, which is why builder sites tend to be slower than the equivalent custom build. You're designing inside someone else's constraints, so the site ends up resembling every other site on that platform. And the further you push past what the platform expects, the more the workarounds pile up.

A custom build is worth paying for when the website is doing real commercial work — when you're competing for search visibility, when speed affects whether people stay, or when the way you sell doesn't fit the shape of a template. If you're not sure which side of that line you're on, say so at the briefing call and you'll get a straight answer, including "a builder would serve you better here" if that's what's true.

Built to still work in three years

Plenty of websites are cheap to build and expensive to own. They're assembled from a stack of plugins that each need updating, by someone who isn't available afterwards, in a way nobody has documented — so the first significant change means starting again.

The default stack here is deliberately plain: modern HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with React or Next.js where a project genuinely needs the extra machinery. Fewer moving parts means fewer things to break, fewer updates to chase, and less that can quietly stop working. It also means the site can be handed to another developer without a translation exercise.

Maintainability is a design decision made at the start, not a service sold at the end — which is why an optional monthly care plan is offered rather than required.

Common questions

More on cost, hosting and support is on the full FAQ page.

Pricing

Website builds start from £1,000 as a one-off. Larger or more complex builds are scoped individually at the briefing stage. Once launched, an optional monthly care plan keeps it maintained, and a managed SEO retainer can drive ongoing search growth.