Design & build
Websites designed for what your business actually sells
Every site we build starts with the same question: what does someone need to see before they pick up the phone? Everything else follows from that.
What’s in a build
Whether you pay monthly or buy outright, the work is the same.
Custom design
A layout drawn around your services, your photos and your customers — then refined with you until it’s right. You approve the homepage design before we build anything.
Mobile first
Most of your visitors are on a phone, often outdoors and on patchy signal. We design for that case first and let the desktop layout follow.
Built to be fast
Hand-written HTML and CSS, images compressed properly, no page-builder bloat. Page speed is a ranking factor and a conversion factor, so we treat it as a requirement, not a nice-to-have.
Words that sell
On Business plans and above we write the copy for your key pages. Plain English, aimed at the customer, with the search terms people actually type.
On-page SEO
Sensible URLs, unique titles and descriptions, heading structure, internal links, schema markup, a sitemap and Search Console set up on day one.
Accessible by default
Real contrast, keyboard navigation, labelled forms, alt text. It’s a legal expectation, it helps your ranking, and it means nobody is shut out of contacting you.
The kinds of sites we build
Most of our work in Witney falls into a handful of shapes. If yours isn’t here, ask — it probably still fits.
Trades and services
Plumbers, electricians, builders, roofers, landscapers. The job of the site is simple: prove you’re real and local, show the work, make the phone number impossible to miss, and rank for “[trade] in Witney”. Usually five to eight pages, one per service, plus a page for each town you cover.
Shops, cafés and venues
Opening hours that are actually correct, a menu or product list that doesn’t need a PDF, directions and parking, and a Google Business Profile that matches. Half your visitors are standing on Market Square deciding where to go.
Professional firms
Accountants, solicitors, consultants, clinics. Credibility is the whole game: clear service pages, real people with real photos, credentials visible, and an enquiry form that doesn’t feel like a leap of faith.
Online shops
If you’re selling online, we’ll set up products, payments and delivery options on our Growth plan. We’ll also tell you honestly when an established platform is a better fit than a custom build.
What we need from you
The build goes quickly when we have these. Don’t worry if you’re missing some — we can write copy, and we can point a photographer at you.
- Your logo, if you have one, and any brand colours
- Photos of your work, your premises or your team
- A list of your services and roughly what you charge
- Any reviews or testimonials you’re proud of
- Access to your domain name, or the details of who registered it
Process
How a build runs
Discovery
We agree what the site must do, which pages it needs and which search terms matter. Half an hour, usually.
Design
You get a full homepage design plus a key inner page. We iterate until you’re happy — no build starts before you sign it off.
Build & copy
We code it, write or refine the words, compress the images and wire up your forms. You review it on a private link.
Launch
We point your domain, add SSL, submit the sitemap, set up Analytics and Search Console, and check every page on real devices.
Under the bonnet
What actually makes a website fast
“Fast” gets claimed by everyone. Here is what we actually do, so you can hold us to it.
Google measures three things about your pages and feeds them into ranking: how quickly the main content appears, how quickly the page responds when someone taps it, and whether the layout jumps around while it loads. They are called Core Web Vitals, and most small business sites fail at least one of them.
The usual cause is not bad hosting. It is weight. A typical page-builder site loads a megabyte of JavaScript, three font families, a slider library and a cookie banner before it shows a single word. On a good connection you barely notice. On mobile data in a village, it is the difference between a customer and a bounce.
How we keep pages light
- No page builder. We write the HTML and CSS by hand. There is no theme framework loading features you will never use.
- No JavaScript framework. A brochure site does not need React. Ours run on a kilobyte or two of plain JavaScript for the mobile menu, and nothing else.
- System fonts by default. Web fonts cost a round trip and often a flash of invisible text. We use the fonts already on your visitor’s device unless your brand genuinely requires otherwise.
- Images sized properly. Compressed, served in modern formats, with width and height set so nothing shifts as they load.
- No third-party clutter. Every external script is another company’s server between you and your customer. We add them only when they earn their place.
The result is pages that typically weigh less than a single stock photograph on a competitor’s site, and that stay fast in three years when nobody has touched them.
Rebuilds
Replacing a site you already have
Most of our work is replacing something rather than starting from nothing. That is usually straightforward, but there are a few things worth knowing before you commit.
You will not lose your Google ranking
This is the fear that stops people rebuilding, and it is a fair one — badly handled migrations do lose rankings. It happens when pages change address and nobody tells search engines where they went.
We map every existing page to its replacement and set up permanent redirects before launch, so the authority your old pages have built up carries across. We keep your best-performing content rather than quietly dropping it, and we check Search Console afterwards to catch anything that slipped.
We will tell you if it does not need replacing
Sometimes a site is fundamentally sound and the real problem is elsewhere: an unclaimed Google Business Profile, no reviews, or content that never answers what customers actually ask. Rebuilding will not fix any of those.
If that is your situation we will say so, and point you at the cheaper fix — often our Hosting & Care plan rather than a full build.
What we need access to
- Your domain registrar login, or the details of whoever holds it
- Your current hosting, if we are migrating content across
- Your Google Business Profile, so we can connect and tidy it
- Any existing Analytics or Search Console property, so history is not lost
If you have lost track of any of these, it is more common than you would think and we can usually help you recover them.
Design and build questions
Will I be able to update the site myself?
You can, and we will show you how for the parts you are likely to want to change — blog posts, prices, opening hours. But most of our clients would rather email us and have it done, which is why change time is built into every plan.
We would rather you spent that hour running your business than fighting an editor.
How many rounds of design changes do I get?
We do not count them. We keep going until the design is right, because a design you are lukewarm about is a site you will not promote.
In practice it almost always settles within two or three rounds, because we agree the direction before drawing anything.
Do you write the content, or do I?
On the Business plan and above we write the copy for your key pages, based on an interview with you. On Starter you provide it, and we will edit and structure what you send.
Either way you approve every word before launch. Nothing goes live in your name that you have not read.
Can you match our existing branding?
Yes. Send us your logo, colours and any brand guidelines and we will work within them. If you do not have any of that, we will establish a simple, consistent look as part of the build at no extra cost.
What if I do not have any photos?
Real photographs of your work, your premises and your team always outperform stock imagery, so it is worth getting some. A modern phone in good light is genuinely sufficient for most of it, and we will tell you what to shoot.
If that is not practical we will use carefully chosen stock in the meantime and swap it out later.
Do you build online shops?
Yes, on the Growth plan — products, payments, delivery options and stock. For larger catalogues we will sometimes recommend an established platform instead, and we will say so rather than taking on something that would serve you worse.
Let’s get your business found in Witney
Tell us what you do and we’ll send you a straight answer: what your site needs, what it will cost each month, and how quickly it can be live.
No pressure, no jargon, no obligation. We usually reply the same working day.