Website design and development

Built to be used, built to last

A website is not a brochure with a login. It is the part of your business that works while nobody is watching it, so we design for the person trying to get something done and build for the team who has to run it afterwards.

See what we build →

Plan it properly

Scope decided by evidence and commercial need, not by taste or by whatever the last agency left behind.

Build it properly

Fast, accessible and readable by machines, because the same work does all three at once.

Run it properly

Hosted, patched, backed up and reviewed, by the team that built it in the first place.

What good looks like

Most sites fail quietly, long before launch.

The failure is rarely the design. It is a scope agreed on instinct, a content model nobody thought about, and a build that is handed over to a team who were never shown how to run it. Six months later the site is out of date and everyone quietly blames the platform.

So we do the unglamorous parts first. What each page is for, who updates it, what counts as success, and what the thing has to talk to. That work is cheap at the start and extremely expensive halfway through a build.

Then we build the thing to be legible. To a person in a hurry, to a crawler, and now to a model deciding which source to quote. Those three want broadly the same things, which is lucky, because it means good structure is not a tax on good design.

Built to be read one page, three kinds of reader

People

Someone on a phone, in a hurry, who wants one specific thing. Clear structure, real language, and a route to the answer that does not depend on them guessing your internal vocabulary.

Search engines

Clean markup, sensible headings, structured data and a site that can be crawled without tripping over itself. The foundations that make ranking possible, before any campaign work begins.

Language models

An answer now sits above the results, and models quote sources they can parse and trust. Consistent facts and quotable structure decide whether that source is you or a competitor.

The build makes this possible. Earning it is the SEO work

Capability

Four kinds of build, one way of working.

Marketing websites

The site that carries your positioning. Structured so both people and machines can read it, fast on a mid range phone, and built so your team can add a page on a Tuesday without raising a ticket.

WordPressLanding pagesContent modellingCore Web VitalsAccessibilityMigrations

Ecommerce

Storefronts wired into the systems you already run rather than bolted on beside them. Stock, payment and fulfilment agreeing with each other matters more to revenue than any amount of visual polish on the product page.

WooCommerceHeadlessPaymentsStock and fulfilmentSubscriptionsCheckout testing

Applications and portals

When a website is not enough. Booking systems, dashboards, member areas and internal tools, built the same way we built Road XS and Pinga Medical, which we still run today and therefore had to build sensibly. Where the member area is the point rather than a feature, branded communities covers it properly.

LaravelReactSingle sign onRole based accessMembership and communityAPI integrationReporting

Care and improvement

Hosting, patching, backups, uptime and a monthly look at what the data is saying. Sites decay quietly, and the cost of noticing late is always higher than the cost of watching.

Managed hostingSecurity patchingHourly backupsUptime monitoringPerformance budgetsConversion work

Selected work

Sites we built, and still look after.

Transport software / our own product

Road 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.

Web applicationSchedulingPaymentsBuilt and run by us

Occupational health / nationwide

Co-Health →

Occupational health provider working with HR teams across the UK. Service pages, referral routes and a regularly published insights library.

WordPressLead generationContentHosting and care

Lighting design / residential and commercial

Lightmaster Direct →

A design led studio site covering lighting design, product supply and technical commissioning, structured around four sectors rather than a product catalogue.

WordPressDiviEditorialHosting and care

Holiday lets / Chipping Campden

Cotswold Charm →

Seven owner managed self catering cottages sleeping two to twenty two. The site exists to win the booking directly, rather than hand a third of it to a booking platform.

WordPressDirect bookingProperty pagesHosting and care

Tourism and community / Cotswolds

Chipping Campden Online →

The information resource for the town, serving visitors and residents from the same site. Business directory, events, a local bulletin and a members area.

WordPressDirectoryEventsMembership

Community venue / registered charity

Townsend Hall →

A 300 seat hall run by trustees in Shipston on Stour. Live availability diary, hire rates, the weekly club timetable and the events programme in one place.

WordPressBooking diaryEventsNot for profit

Every site above is hosted and maintained by us

Client result / placeholder

00%

Replace this with a real number from a real build. A load time cut, a conversion lift or a support ticket reduction all work here. An invented figure will not do the same job.

Read the case study →

How it runs

Five stages, and you see every one of them.

Understand

What the site has to achieve commercially, who has to use it, and what it needs to talk to.

Define

Sitemap, page purpose and success measures agreed in writing. This is what everything is checked against later.

Design

Key templates reviewed in the browser, at real widths, with real content. You approve something that behaves.

Build

On staging, with access throughout. Tested across devices, browsers and assistive technology before launch.

Improve

Launch is when the useful data starts. We review it monthly and change what is underperforming.

Straight answers

Things we will probably talk you out of.

We host and maintain most of what we build, so bad advice comes back to us eventually.

A rebuild you do not need
An audit and a month of fixes often gets you further than a new site, at a fraction of the cost. We will say so before you have spent anything.
A bespoke CMS
It feels like control until the person who built it leaves. Boring, well supported platforms are easier to hire for and cheaper to live with.
Designing on desktop first
Most of your traffic is on a phone held one handed on poor signal. Designing there first tends to improve the desktop version too.
A page for every keyword
Thin pages competing with each other rank worse than one page that genuinely answers the question, and they are miserable to maintain.
Launching without measurement
If analytics and goals are not working on day one, you have no way of knowing whether the new site is better than the old one.
Animation as a substitute for clarity
Motion should help someone understand where they are. When it is doing the job that good copy should be doing, it is decoration.

Insights

Technology moves fast. We write down what actually matters.

Read everything →