Small business websites, built properly.

Most agency-led web-design conversations start with what the site should look like. That is the wrong starting point. A small business website needs to do four things, in roughly this order: explain what you do, prove you are credible, make it obvious where you work, and tell the visitor how to get in touch.

Everything else, the hero animation, the parallax scroll, the gradient backgrounds, the inspirational stock photography, is decoration. Useful sometimes, harmful when it gets in the way of the four jobs above. Most small business sites that "look beautiful" but generate no enquiries fail because they look beautiful at the cost of being usable.

We start every project with the four jobs above and build out from there. Decoration earns its place by helping the visitor do one of those four things faster, not by impressing other designers on Dribbble.

Roughly 65% of small business website traffic now comes from mobile devices, and for trades and local services it is usually higher. When someone googles "emergency electrician Helmsley" at 9pm on a Tuesday, they are doing it on a phone. If your site loads slowly on that phone, or the contact button is buried below a slideshow they cannot dismiss, they will be on your competitor's site within ten seconds.

We design the mobile version of every page first, then adapt it for desktop. That is the opposite of how most agencies still work, and it shows in their results. A site that was designed for a 27-inch monitor first and "made responsive" afterwards is almost always a worse mobile experience than a site that was designed for a 5-inch screen from the start.

A common mistake among small businesses ordering their first website is over-scoping the page count. "We want a homepage, about us, our story, our values, our team, our process, our services, services 1 to 6 on separate pages, our locations on separate pages, testimonials, gallery, a blog, FAQ..." That is twenty pages, half of which will never be visited, all of which dilute the focus of the site.

Most small businesses need somewhere between five and eight good pages. We agree the page count in the brief, based on what your business actually needs to explain, not on a tier you have been sold. A focused five-page site that explains one thing well will outperform a twenty-page site that explains five things badly, both for visitors and for Google. Less is more, when the less is well-chosen.

If you genuinely need more, we will tell you. Multi-service businesses with five or six distinct service lines sometimes need real service pages for each. But the default assumption is that you need fewer pages than you think.

We build local SEO foundations into every site at launch, not because it costs extra, but because doing it later costs more. That means: page titles and meta descriptions written to match how customers actually search, Google Business Profile aligned with what the site says, NAP (name, address, phone) consistent across the site and your GBP listing, schema markup for local business and service pages, and the site submitted to Search Console properly.

This is not the same thing as the active monthly local SEO work on the £49 Local SEO plan. It is the foundation that work builds on. Every site we launch gets the foundations whichever plan you are on; the £49 plan is what keeps adding to them month after month.

We build with modern static-site tools (Astro, in case you are technical and curious). A static site is essentially a folder of pre-built HTML files served straight from a global CDN, no database lookup, no PHP runtime, no plugin chain. That makes them genuinely fast (1-2 seconds to first paint on a mobile connection), genuinely cheap to run (which is why hosting is simply included in your plan, with nothing extra to think about), and genuinely secure (there is no admin panel to hack into).

You do not need to care about any of that. You will care about the visible result: pages that load instantly, a site that does not break when you forget to update something, and a Google PageSpeed score that does not give your prospects a reason to bounce.