Cotswolds website development
Half your customers search for a brand. The other half search for a village
One person is typing Cotswolds cottage from a sofa in Surrey. The other is typing the name of your village from two miles away. They are looking for the same business and they will never meet on the same page. We work from the north Cotswolds and two of the sites further down this page are Cotswolds businesses we still run, so we have watched this go wrong a few times.
See what we build →01
We are here
Our office is in the north Cotswolds, not a satellite address on a contact page. Meetings happen in person as a matter of course.
02
Built to be found
Structured for Google and for the AI answers that now sit above it, and built to work for both kinds of search at once.
03
Still looked after
Hosted, patched, backed up hourly and monitored by us, for as long as you want us to. Most of our work is sites we have run for years.
The CotswoldsNational Landscape
The Cotswolds
Ninety miles of it, and six counties.
The Cotswolds is not a town. It is a designated National Landscape of roughly eight hundred square miles running from Chipping Campden in the north down to the edge of Bath, across parts of six counties. Somebody searching for the Cotswolds could be looking at a business sixty miles from yours. That single fact makes a website here behave differently from one in a town, and it is the thing most Cotswolds sites never account for.
You have two audiences and they arrive by different roads. The first is national and aspirational, searching for a Cotswolds cottage, a Cotswolds wedding venue, a Cotswolds farm shop, and choosing between you and a listings platform with a marketing budget in the millions. The second is local and specific, searching for your village, your town, your trade. Build only for the brand and you become invisible to your neighbours. Build only for the village and you never appear in the search that actually drives the season.
Under both of those sit two practical realities. The year here is lopsided, with a summer that carries the winter, so a site that is merely adequate in November has to be excellent in July. And the signal is genuinely poor in the valleys, for your visitors and for you when you are trying to update the thing from the office. Neither is a reason to build less. Both are reasons to build lighter.
Chipping Campden, Broadway, Blockley, Moreton in Marsh, Stow on the Wold, Bourton on the Water and Winchcombe. This is where we are.
Cirencester, Northleach, Burford, Bibury, Tetbury, Painswick, Nailsworth, Stroud and Malmesbury.
Cheltenham, Gloucester, Stratford upon Avon, Chipping Norton, Witney and Tewkesbury.
We work nationally too. Being local is an option, not a limit
What we build
Four kinds of job, one way of working.
Websites for Cotswolds businesses
The site has to look the part, because this is a market where people are paying partly for how things feel, and it has to load on a phone with one bar somewhere between Stow and Bourton. Those two pull against each other and most sites here resolve it in favour of the photographs. We would rather compress the images properly and keep both.
Direct bookings, shops and mail order
Cottages, rooms, tables, weddings, courses and produce. A Cotswolds product often sells nationally long after the visitor has gone home, which makes the shop and the mailing list worth as much as the booking engine. Every stay or order that comes through your own site rather than a platform is the difference between turnover and what you keep.
Found for the brand and for the village
Two intents, two jobs. The national Cotswolds terms are dominated by platforms, so the realistic ground there is the long tail and the specific: what you actually are, where you actually are, who you actually suit. The local terms are won in the map pack and on accuracy. And an AI assistant asked for somewhere to stay near Bourton needs to be able to read both from you without guessing.
Hosting and looking after it
Hosting, patching, hourly backups, uptime monitoring and someone to ring who knows where you are. A site that goes down on a Friday in August is not a technical inconvenience here, it is a weekend of bookings, and it tends to happen at exactly the moment nobody is at a desk.
Our work
Sites we’ve made and still in our care
Cotswold Charm →
Seven owner managed self catering cottages sleeping two to twenty two. Exactly the two audience problem this page describes, solved by winning the booking directly rather than handing a share of it to a platform.
Tourism and community / Chipping CampdenChipping Campden Online →
The information resource for a north Cotswolds town that lives off visitors, serving them and residents from the same site. Business directory, events, a local bulletin and a members area.
Lighting design / residential and commercialLightmaster Direct →
A design led studio site covering lighting design, product supply and technical commissioning, structured around four sectors rather than a product catalogue.
Community venue / Shipston on StourTownsend Hall →
A 300 seat hall run by trustees. Live availability diary, hire rates, the weekly club timetable and the events programme in one place, maintained by volunteers rather than staff.
Occupational health / nationwideCo-Health →
Occupational health provider working with HR teams across the UK. Service pages, referral routes and a regularly published insights library, built for a considered enquiry rather than an impulse.
Transport software / our own productRoad XS →
The platform we build and run ourselves, connecting volunteer drivers with passengers travelling to medical appointments. Used by community transport schemes across the UK.
Every site above is hosted and maintained by us
Working from the Cotswolds since
Twenty years is a long time to have to live with your own decisions. It is also why almost everything on this page is a site we still host, patch and answer the phone for.
How it runs
Five stages, and you see every one of them.
01
Talk
Half an hour on what the site has to do, what is not working now, and who it is really for. At your place, wherever in the Cotswolds that is.
02
Plan
Sitemap, page purpose and a fixed price agreed in writing. This is what everything gets checked against later.
03
Design
You see and sign off the design before a line of it is built, which is the cheapest possible moment to change your mind.
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Build
Built and tested on a private staging address. You review it on your own phone before anybody else sees it.
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Look after
Hosting, patching, backups and a monthly look at what the numbers are saying. Or hand it over entirely. Your call.
Towns we cover
Questions
The things Cotswolds businesses actually ask.
Answered plainly, because a page that dodges the price question tends to get closed.
- Where in the Cotswolds are you?
The north Cotswolds, near Chipping Campden. That is a working office rather than a forwarding address, and it means a first meeting anywhere between Broadway and Cirencester is a drive rather than a video call. We cover the whole of the landscape and work nationally as well, so distance is never the thing that decides whether we take something on.
- Should we target Cotswolds or our own village?
Both, but not in the same place and not in the same way. The village or town is where you will actually win, because the competition is small and the intent is high, so that belongs in your page titles, your Google Business Profile and your address markup. Cotswolds belongs in the language a visitor uses when they describe what you are, and in the long tail rather than the head term. Chasing the bare word Cotswolds on its own is where most of the budget in this area gets quietly wasted.
- How much does a website cost?
It depends on scope, goals and features. A brochure site for a Cotswolds trade and a booking system that takes payments and manages availability across several properties are different pieces of work, and quoting either from a price list would be guessing. We will give you a fixed figure in writing after a proper conversation about what the site has to do.
- Can we take bookings without paying commission on every one?
Partly, and it is worth being straight about it. The platforms genuinely do bring you guests who would never have found you, so cutting them off entirely is rarely the right move. What you can change is the split. Somebody who has already decided on you, or who is coming back for a third year, should never have to go through a platform to book. We build the direct route and make it the obvious one, and the commission you stop paying on those bookings tends to cover the site fairly quickly.
- Our broadband and signal are poor. Does that matter?
It matters for your visitors more than for you, since a good share of them are looking you up from a lane somewhere with one bar. We build light pages, compress images properly and keep the plugin count down so the site loads on a bad connection rather than only on a good one. It also makes updating it from your own office a great deal less painful.
- How long does a build take?
Most sites run somewhere between six and ten weeks from the first meeting to going live. The variable is almost never the build. It is content, and how quickly the photographs and the words come back. If your year is seasonal, starting in the winter means it is live and settled well before it needs to earn.
- Will my site rank for Cotswolds searches?
Rankings are earned rather than bought, so nobody honest promises you a position, and the broad Cotswolds terms are held by booking platforms and tourism bodies that outspend everyone. The realistic and considerably more profitable ground is the specific: your village, your kind of property, your speciality, and the map pack. What the build guarantees is that nothing is in the way: clean structure, fast pages, correct local markup and a site the AI assistants can read without tripping over it.
- What happens once it goes live?
We host it, patch it, back it up hourly and watch that it is still up. Most of the sites on this page have been in our care for years, which is rather the point. A website that nobody is looking after decays quietly, and you tend to find out from a customer.