Web design
Most small business websites are slow, invisible to search, and owned by whoever built them. We build the opposite: fast, findable, and entirely yours from the first day.
The short answer
A small business website should load in under two seconds, answer the question the visitor arrived with, and make the next step obvious. Most do none of those things — not because they were built badly, but because they were built to look like a brochure rather than to be found and acted on. We build for search visibility and conversion first, and the site looks good as a consequence.
What's included
- A scoping session: who the site is for, what each page has to do, what success looks like
- Design and build, mobile-first, to Core Web Vitals targets
- Page structure and copy briefs aimed at real search intent, not guesses
- Technical foundations: clean URLs, titles, meta descriptions, canonicals, schema
- Google Analytics and Search Console configured before launch, not months later
- Forms wired to somewhere real, with conversion tracking on them
- A handover session, and documentation you keep
- Domain, hosting and code in your name from day one
What we hear before we start
- “We can't update it ourselves without ringing someone.”
- “It looks fine but nobody ever finds it.”
- “It takes about eight seconds to load on a phone.”
- “The person who built it has disappeared.”
- “We don't actually know who owns the domain.”
- “It gets traffic but nobody ever calls.”
A job like this
A Cleveland practice had a five-year-old site averaging 7.8 seconds to first paint on mobile, mostly from unoptimised photos and four plugins doing the same job. Rebuilt as eight pages with proper image handling and no plugin stack: 1.4 seconds, and enquiries roughly doubled within a quarter without any change to advertising spend.
How a build runs
01
Scope and structure
Who is arriving, what they searched, and what each page must answer. This is where a site is won or lost — long before anything is designed.
02
Design and content
Layouts you approve, then the words. Content is written to the brief per page rather than filled in afterwards with whatever fits.
03
Build and test
Built to speed and accessibility targets, tested on a throttled connection rather than on office fibre, with analytics and Search Console live before launch.
04
Launch and hand over
Redirects mapped, sitemap submitted, access transferred to you. Then a care plan if you want it looked after, or nothing at all if you do not.
Where this goes next
Website redesign
Rebuilding an existing site without throwing away the rankings it already has. The redirect mapping is the whole job.
Website care plans
Hosting, updates, backups, uptime monitoring and small changes — so an unpatched site is not your next security incident.
SEO
A fast, well-built site is the foundation. Ranking for the searches that matter is the work that follows it.
Questions about web design
What does a small business website cost?
A straightforward brochure site of five to eight pages sits in the low thousands; something with booking, a portal or e-commerce is a different conversation. We quote a fixed figure after a short scoping call rather than an hourly rate, because an hourly rate rewards the wrong things. What IT support costs explains our approach to pricing generally.
Do you use WordPress?
Usually, because it is the platform your next provider will also know, and not locking you in matters more than our preference. For simple sites we sometimes build static pages instead — faster, cheaper to host and almost nothing to keep patched. We will tell you which one your site actually needs.
Will the site be fast?
That is a build decision, not a plugin you add later. We build to Core Web Vitals targets: largest contentful paint under 2.0 seconds on a throttled mobile connection, and no layout shift. Most small business sites fail this because of unoptimised images and a stack of plugins nobody audited.
Do you write the content?
We can, and it is usually the difference between a site that ranks and one that just exists. If you would rather write it yourself we will give you a brief per page — what the page needs to answer, roughly how long, and which search intent it is aimed at.
Who owns the website when it's finished?
You do — domain, hosting account, code and content. Same principle as our IT work. If you leave we hand over access the same week and you take everything with you.
Can you host and look after it afterwards?
Yes. Website care plans cover hosting, updates, backups, uptime monitoring and small changes. A WordPress site left unpatched for a year is one of the more common ways small businesses get compromised.
Related reading: what a small business website costs · how long SEO takes · AEO