Web design for trades and local service businesses

What we're actually designing for

Somebody's boiler has packed in. They're standing in a cold kitchen with a phone in one hand, they've searched "plumber near me", and they are going to pick one of the first three results that looks legitimate. They will spend maybe forty seconds on your website before they either call you or go back and try the next one.

That's the moment the whole site has to win. Not the About page. Not the animation on the homepage. The forty seconds where a stranger decides whether you look like someone who'll turn up, do the job properly, and not rip them off.

So every site we build gets judged against three questions, in this order: Is it obvious what you do and where you do it? Is it obvious you're trustworthy? Is it effortless to contact you? Anything that doesn't serve one of those three gets cut.

What's included in every build

• Custom design, not a template. Built around your trade and your actual services — not a theme with your logo dropped in the corner.
• Mobile-first, genuinely. Most trade enquiries come from a phone, often outdoors in bad light. We design that version first and scale up, rather than the other way round.
• Speed as a feature. Hand-coded, lightweight pages. No bloated page-builder loading nine megabytes of JavaScript to show a photo of a bathroom.
• Click-to-call and working forms. Tested on real devices, with enquiries landing in your inbox and a fallback so nothing silently disappears.
• Local SEO foundations. Proper page titles, service and area pages, schema markup, and a sitemap submitted to Google — so the site has a chance of ranking from day one.
• Trust signals built into the layout. Certifications, insurance, guarantees and reviews placed where people look for them, not buried on a subpage.
• Full ownership. Domain, code, hosting and analytics in your name from day one. No lock-in, no hostage situations.

How the build runs

A Starter site typically takes two to four weeks; a Growth site four to eight. The timeline is fixed in your proposal before any money changes hands, and the single most common cause of delay is waiting on photos — so we tell you exactly what we need on day one.

1. Discovery call. Free, no pressure. What you do, where you work, who you compete with, what you want the site to bring in.
2. Fixed proposal. Scope, timeline, deliverables and every cost in writing. If your budget doesn't match what you want, we say so now rather than halfway through.
3. Design and build. You see progress at each milestone and give feedback. Nothing gets built in secret and unveiled at the end.
4. Launch and handover. We go live, transfer everything into your name, and walk you through managing it.
5. Support. 30 days on Starter, 90 on Growth. After that, care plans are optional, not assumed.

What it costs

Starter sites start at £799 and Growth sites at £1,899. Both are one-off costs, both include full ownership, and neither has a hidden monthly fee attached. You'll still pay for a domain (roughly £10–15 a year) and hosting (often free to £10 a month at your scale), both set up in your name and explained before you commit.

If you want to sanity-check those numbers against the wider market, our guide to UK website costs breaks down what every price bracket from £500 to £10,000 actually buys.