Web development for UK businesses that need their website to bring in work

Your website is the thing a new customer checks before they pick up the phone. If it takes five seconds to load on a train, reads badly on a phone or is vague about what you do and what it costs, they go back to Google and ring the next firm. Web development is the work of building that site properly: the pages, the code behind them, the forms that reach your inbox and the hosting that keeps it online.

We build business websites by hand for companies across the UK. No Elementor, no Divi, no £59 theme from a marketplace with forty plug-ins bolted on. That is a deliberate choice, and it is the main reason our sites are fast, stay fast and cost less to change in year three than the ones we are usually asked to replace.

Who this is for

• Service businesses that need enquiries: trades, clinics, salons, solicitors, accountants, consultants, studios.
• Growing companies whose current site was built cheaply and now holds them back. Slow pages, contact forms that quietly stopped working in 2024, a CMS nobody dares open.
• Charities and campaign teams who need pages that load instantly on a poor connection and meet accessibility standards.
• Businesses that need something bespoke on top of a normal site: online booking with deposits, a quote calculator, a members’ area, a link to stock or CRM data.

If you are a sole trader who needs a single page with a phone number, a hosted builder will probably do, and our article on Wix vs a web agency works through the three-year numbers honestly.

What you get

• A hand-built classic WordPress theme, or Laravel and custom PHP when the project has logic WordPress would fight against.
• Mobile-first templates tested on real phones. We aim for a Lighthouse score of 100 and build to WCAG 2.2 AA on every template, not only the homepage.
• Editable content areas, so your team can change text, prices, images and news without ringing us.
• Forms that go to your inbox and, where useful, to your CRM or mailing list, with spam filtering that doesn’t rely on an annoying puzzle.
• Technical SEO from the first commit: titles and descriptions, XML sitemap, schema markup, clean URLs and 301 redirects from every old page.
• Cloudflare in front for caching, SSL and protection from junk traffic.
• A training session and a short written guide, so you can run the site without us.

Why no page builders

Page builders are sold as freedom. In practice they load a lot of code on every page, they make the site dependent on a third-party licence, and they let anyone with a login break the spacing, fonts and contrast in an afternoon. We have rebuilt plenty of them, and the pattern is always the same: the same design, rebuilt without the builder, loads in a fraction of the code and becomes far quicker on a phone.

We build custom blocks instead. A hero, a service card, a price table, a testimonial: your editors fill in fields and the design holds. It is less flexible in theory and much more useful in practice.

How a project runs

1. What is the site for?

We start with what success looks like: more calls, more booking requests, fewer “how much do you charge?” emails, better candidates for a job advert. That decides the page list and the calls to action, before anyone talks about colours.

2. Sitemap and wireframes

You see the structure of every key page in grey boxes first. It is cheaper to move a section on a wireframe than on a finished design, and it is where most of the useful arguments happen.

3. Design and build

We design in the browser and build the theme ourselves. You get a private staging link and watch pages come together, so there is no big reveal and no surprise.

4. Test, launch and watch

We test forms, speed, accessibility and every redirect from the old site, launch at a quiet time and keep an eye on Google Search Console for the following weeks. Rankings can wobble after any rebuild; proper redirects stop them falling off a cliff.

What it costs

Our fixed-price website packages cover most small-business needs. These are current offer prices, excluding VAT.

Add VAT at 20 % if you are VAT-registered and reclaim it; the Pro Website is £900 including VAT. If a package doesn’t fit, you can book development hours: £60 an hour for custom development, £50 for WordPress. Hours never expire and discounts start at 5 % for 10 hours, rising to 25 % at 100 hours. Twenty hours of custom development is £1,200 less 15 %, so £1,020 plus VAT.

A rough guide to which route people take: a new business with a clear offer goes Startup or Pro; a firm that needs bookings or payments goes Elite; anything with a shop, multiple languages or integrations is either the Business package or a quoted bespoke build. Our pillar guide to what a website costs in the UK covers the wider market.

Technology

For most business sites: a classic WordPress theme we write ourselves, PHP 8, Cloudflare, Stripe for payments. When a project needs complex pricing rules, multi-step workflows or a lot of custom data, we use Laravel with React or Vue on the front end. You own the code, the domain and the hosting accounts.

Working with us from anywhere in the UK

We are based in London, and build sites for businesses from Manchester and Leeds to Cardiff and Edinburgh. Most projects run on video calls, a shared staging site and a phone that gets answered. If you are in London or the Home Counties and would rather meet in person, we are happy to. For a sense of our work, Hypnotic Art’s WordPress site with online bookings is one of ours, and our client page shows more.

Talk to us about your website

Tell us what the site needs to achieve and what you have now. We will come back with a plain recommendation: a package, a block of hours or a fixed quote for something bespoke. Get in touch or call 020 3918 3814.