Web design in St Albans

If you run a business in St Albans and need a new website, you do not have to choose between a London agency and an online-only one. WE-DEV designs and builds websites from our office at 17 Orient Close, a short walk from the city centre. We meet you in person, build your site on a hand-coded WordPress theme and hand over everything when it is paid for. Fixed-price websites start at £350 + VAT, and you can also hire us by the hour from £45 + VAT.

Why choose a St Albans web designer

There is nothing wrong with working remotely, and many of our clients never need to meet us. But when you are paying for the thing most customers see before they ever call you, being able to sit in the same room helps.

• You can sit down together. A first meeting over coffee on St Peter’s Street or at your premises often saves weeks of email. We can see your shop, clinic or office, meet the people who will update the site and understand how customers find you.
• We know the local market. St Albans customers search for things like “plumber in Marshalswick”, “physio near St Albans City station” or “wedding venue Harpenden”. We write page titles, service pages and Google Business Profile details with those searches in mind.
• Someone is around after launch. If something breaks on a Saturday market day, you are calling a business ten minutes away, not a ticket queue in another time zone.

Who we design websites for

Most of our St Albans work is for small and medium businesses that sell a service or have a physical location. That includes:

• Independent shops, cafés and restaurants in the city centre, Fleetville and Harpenden that need opening times, menus, online ordering or a small WooCommerce shop.
• Professional firms, such as accountants, solicitors, architects and financial advisers, that need a credible site with clear services and a contact form that actually reaches them.
• Clinics, salons, studios and personal trainers who need online bookings with deposits to cut no-shows.
• Trades and home-improvement businesses serving St Albans and the surrounding villages, who need fast mobile pages and good local search visibility.
• Charities, schools and community groups. We also run a dedicated school digital services offer.

What a WE-DEV website includes

Every site we build follows the same standards, whatever the budget.

• A hand-built WordPress theme. No page builders, so pages load quickly and stay easy to edit. You update text, images and blog posts yourself in the WordPress editor.
• Lighthouse 95+. We aim for 95 or more in Google’s Lighthouse tests for performance, accessibility, best practice and SEO on every template, measured on mobile.
• WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility. Readable contrast, keyboard access, labelled forms and proper headings, which help visitors with disabilities and help search engines understand your pages.
• Local SEO foundations. Clean page titles, structured data for your business, an XML sitemap and help setting up or tidying your Google Business Profile.
• Security and backups. Cloudflare, a firewall, login protection and automatic backups as standard.
• Ownership. Once you have paid in full, the design and code are yours, and so are the hosting, domain and admin accounts.

Prices for St Albans businesses

We publish our prices so you can budget before we meet. All prices exclude VAT at 20 %.

Package	Price	What you get	Typical timeline
Startup Website	£350 (usually £600)	5 pages, 3 custom banners, slider, sitemap; CMS +£149, responsive layouts +£99	About 2 weeks
Pro Website	£750 (usually £1,200)	10 pages with CMS, 5 banners, project manager, full deployment	2–3 weeks
Elite Website	£999 (usually £1,990)	Up to 15 unique pages, bookings, payments, lead forms, newsletter, money-back guarantee	3–6 weeks
Business / E-commerce	£2,650 (usually £5,200)	Custom WordPress or PHP site or shop, payments, multi-language, explainer video, account manager	Agreed after discovery

You pay a 50 % deposit to start and the balance before launch. See the full details on our packages page.

If you already have a site and just need changes, a redesign of a few pages or help with WooCommerce, book hours online. Website design is £45 an hour, WordPress development £50 an hour and e-commerce development £65 an hour, with discounts from 5 % for 10 hours up to 25 % for 100 hours. Hours never expire.

How a St Albans project runs

1. Meet. We meet at our office, at your premises or in a café in the city centre. You tell us about your business, your customers and what the site must do.
2. Quote. Within a few days you get a written scope with a fixed price or an estimate in hours.
3. Design. We design your homepage and one inner page and refine them with you before writing production code.
4. Build. We build on a private staging site you can check at any time, then test on real phones and browsers.
5. Launch and train. We put the site live, check forms and analytics, and show you how to edit it, in person if you like.

Local work and wider experience

We are a small agency, but not a purely local one. Our team has worked on a donation e-commerce platform for UNICEF, an accessibility-led redesign concept for WWF and campaign landing pages for ActionAid. Closer to the scale of most St Albans businesses, we built the WordPress website for Hypnotic Art, with online bookings that take a deposit through Stripe and local SEO foundations. You can see more on our clients page.

Getting to us

Our office is at Orient Close, AL1 1AJ, within easy reach of St Albans City station. If you are coming from Harpenden, Redbourn, London Colney, Park Street, Bricket Wood or Wheathampstead, we are happy to come to you instead. For meetings in London, the Thameslink train from St Albans City reaches St Pancras in about 20 minutes, so we can meet clients in the capital at short notice.

Useful reading

Before you choose an agency, read our guide to choosing a St Albans web design agency you can meet. For budgeting, see how much a website costs in the UK, and for getting found locally, read local SEO for Hertfordshire businesses.

We also cover the rest of the county; see web design in Hertfordshire. If you need more than a website, such as a shop, an app or custom software, the same team can help.

Contact us or call +44 (0)1727 309243 and we will find a time to meet, at our office or yours.