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Web Design & Development

Service / 01

A site that still works two years from now

Most websites are expensive after they're built, not before. Slow to load, awkward to update, and needing a developer for every small change. We build for the two years after launch, not just launch day.

The problem

The site looked great on handover day

Then the first real content went in and the layout broke. Then a product needed updating and nobody could work out how. Then it turned out the homepage weighed 8MB and took six seconds to load on a phone — which is where most of the traffic was.

None of that shows in a design mockup. It shows three months later, when the site has become something you work around rather than work with.

A website isn't finished when it launches. That's the point where it starts costing you something.

So the questions we ask early are the boring ones. Who updates this, and how often? What happens when a product title is three times longer than the placeholder? What does this look like on a four-year-old Android on a slow connection — because that's a real customer, not an edge case.

What's included

Six parts of a build

Design is one of them, not the whole thing. A beautiful site that loads slowly and can't be updated is a liability with good typography.

Structure & wireframes

What goes where, and why, before anything is styled. Cheaper to argue about a wireframe than a finished page.

Visual design

A look built from your brand rather than a template with your logo on it. Designed at mobile width first, because that's where it'll be seen.

Development

Clean, semantic markup you or another developer can pick up later. No framework chosen because it was fashionable that quarter.

Performance

Image optimisation, lazy loading, minimal scripts, Core Web Vitals in the green. Speed is a ranking factor and a conversion factor.

SEO foundations

Crawlable structure, sensible URLs, schema, metadata. Built in from the start rather than retrofitted when rankings don't come.

Tracking, set up properly

GA4, Tag Manager and conversion events configured and verified before launch — so you can measure the site from day one.

Our standard

The targets we build to

Agreed before we start, measured on a mid-range phone over 4G — not on a developer's laptop over office wifi.

MetricWhy it mattersTarget
Largest Contentful PaintWhen the main content appearsunder 2.5s
Interaction to Next PaintHow fast it responds to a tapunder 200ms
Cumulative Layout ShiftWhether things jump as it loadsunder 0.1
Page weightWhat it costs on mobile dataunder 1.5MB

These are Google's Core Web Vitals thresholds. They affect rankings, and they affect conversion more — a site that takes five seconds on a phone loses a meaningful share of visitors before it finishes loading.

How a build runs

Four to eight weeks

Week 1 Discovery

Work out what the site has to do

Who it's for, what action it should drive, who updates it afterwards, and what's wrong with the current one. Most of the important decisions get made here, before any design exists.

Week 1–2 Structure

Wireframes and sitemap

Layouts in grey boxes. Unglamorous, and the cheapest point to change your mind — moving a section in a wireframe takes minutes, in a built page it takes a day.

Week 2–4 Design

Visual design, mobile first

Key pages designed at phone width, then desktop. Two rounds of revisions included — in our experience a third round usually means the brief wasn't right, so we'd revisit that instead.

Week 3–6 Build

Development and content

Built against the performance targets as we go, not optimised at the end. Real content goes in as early as possible — placeholder text hides most layout problems until launch week.

Week 6–8 Launch

Test, migrate, hand over

Cross-browser and device testing, redirects mapped from the old site, tracking verified live. Then training and written documentation, so your team can run it without us.

What we won't tell you

That a new website will fix your traffic. It usually won't on its own — if nobody is finding you now, a better-looking site that nobody finds is the same problem with a nicer layout.

We also won't push a rebuild when a fix would do. Plenty of sites we look at need a speed pass, a restructure and better content rather than starting over. That's a smaller invoice and we'll say so.

And we won't hold your site hostage. The code, the domain and the hosting are yours, in your accounts, from the start. If you want to move to another developer in a year, nothing has to be rebuilt and nothing goes with us.

What you get

On handover day

  • Full ownership of code, domain and hosting — in your accounts, not ours.
  • Core Web Vitals in the green, verified on mobile before we call it done.
  • Written documentation covering how to update everything you'll need to.
  • A training session recorded, so new staff can watch it later.
  • Tracking live and verified — GA4, Tag Manager, conversion events firing correctly.
  • Redirects mapped from the old site, so existing rankings survive the move.
Questions

About web projects specifically

It depends on page count, whether it's selling online, and how much content needs writing. We quote a fixed price after discovery rather than an hourly rate, so the number doesn't move unless the scope does. If something would push it up, we tell you before doing it.

Entirely. Code, domain and hosting sit in your accounts from the beginning. Some agencies keep the domain or host on their own infrastructure, which makes leaving expensive — it's worth asking anyone you talk to about this directly.

That's the intention. Routine changes — text, images, products, posts — shouldn't need a developer. We set the site up so they don't, then show your team how, and leave written documentation plus a recording of the training.

This is where most rebuilds go wrong. Every old URL gets mapped to its new equivalent with a permanent redirect before launch, and we monitor Search Console afterwards. A rebuild done without that regularly costs businesses most of their organic traffic overnight.

Often just fixes. If the structure is sound and the problem is speed, content or layout, that's a much smaller project. We'll look at what you have and tell you honestly which situation you're in — a site review costs you nothing either way.

A warranty period where anything broken gets fixed at no cost. After that, ongoing support is optional and monthly — plenty of clients handle their own updates and only call us for larger changes. We don't require a retainer to keep your site working.

Also available

Pairs well with

Start with a site review

We'll test your current site on a real phone, check its Core Web Vitals and look at how it's built — then tell you whether you need a rebuild or a fix. You keep the findings either way.

No pitch deck, no pressure. Just a conversation about what you've got.

Web Design & Development