Web design and branding
You know precisely what is wrong with your website. You have known for a while. It is not taste that has stopped you fixing it, it is time, and the fact that every conversation about it turns into a project you would end up running yourself. So it stays as it is, quietly representing a business that has long since moved past it.
Half an hour, no charge, and no obligation at the end of it.
If any of this lands
None of these is a website problem on its own. Together they are the same one.
You are not buying a website. You are buying the thirty seconds in which somebody decides what league you are in.
What a website is for
The first job is to look like the business you have actually built. That is not vanity. Design is the fastest signal of quality a stranger has, and they read it in about two seconds, long before they read a word. If the site looks a level below the work, the work gets priced a level below too.
The second is to make it obvious why somebody should choose you, and then make it easy for them to act. Plenty of beautiful sites fail at that, and plenty of sites that convert are unpleasant to look at. You need both, and they are not in tension. They are the same craft applied twice.
Considered, current, and clearly yours rather than a template with a logo dropped in. The kind of site that makes somebody assume the rest of the operation is run to the same standard, because that assumption is exactly what they are making.
Your buyer arrives with questions of their own. What is this, is it for me, are they any good, has this worked for somebody like me, what happens next. A site that answers those in order turns a browser into an enquiry. Most sites answer none of them.
None of it matters if the right people never arrive. Claiming the terms your buyers actually search, a page for each thing you do, and the groundwork that gets you quoted by the AI tools people now ask before they ask Google.
Presence is not decoration. It is the first thing you are judged on and the last thing most founders get round to.
Why me
I am a company director at a chartered advisory firm, and a consultant to founders. I have built and run three ventures of my own, some of which worked and some of which did not. I buy from suppliers, I sit in the meetings where one gets chosen over another, and I have been on your side of a project that went sideways.
So this does not come from a designer who has read about business. It comes from someone who runs one, and who spends most of the week working on what a company sells, who buys it, and where the deal quietly falls over. That is why I start with your market and your buyer rather than with a design tool, and it is why I will tell you when a new website is the wrong place to spend the money. That has happened, and it will happen again.
It also means I know what you are actually dreading, which is not the cost. It is being handed a list of homework, chasing a supplier for updates, and losing a fortnight of your own attention to something you hired out precisely so you would not have to think about it.
Your time
This is the part most people do not believe until they have done it. Website projects do not consume your time because the work is hard. They consume it because you end up writing the content, chasing for updates, and holding the whole thing in your head between emails.
One call
Everything I need to understand the business, the buyer and the work you want more of. One conversation, not a series of them.
Marking up the words
I write every page. You read it and tell me where I have got it wrong. You are editing, which is fast, rather than writing, which is not.
Two rounds of changes
Split across the build. You look at a real site on a real link rather than trying to picture it from a description.
Everything between those three hours happens without you, and you can still see all of it, which is what the portal is for.
The client portal
Every client gets their own private login. Not a shared folder, not a spreadsheet, not a weekly email you have to go looking for. A proper portal, built for this, which I have yet to see another web designer offer.
Open it whenever the thought crosses your mind, at half past ten at night if that is when you think about the business, and in ten seconds you know which stage the build is at, what is finished, what is waiting on you and what I have done since you last looked. Documents go across by dragging them onto the page. Every update I post sits there in date order. Nothing lives in an email thread that one of us has to find again.
What your project looks like when you open it.
It exists because silence is what makes these projects feel out of control. When you can see the state of a thing, you stop carrying it around, and you get your attention back for the business rather than spending it managing me.
What you get
Most quotes cover the build and leave you to supply the words, the images and the point. That is precisely where these projects stall, and it is why so many sites go live half finished and stay that way for years.
Before anything is designed I go through the businesses you are compared to and write up what they cover, what they miss, and where there is ground nobody is holding. That document shapes every page and it is yours.
Not a template with prompts in it. Specific, considered sentences that make your case and that the search and AI tools can quote, because vague pages get skipped by both.
Logo and every variation, colour, type, and the rules that keep it consistent across a proposal, a deck, an email signature, a social profile and a phone screen.
The technical groundwork, a page for each thing you do, your Google Business Profile set up properly, and the listings and profiles that carry weight in your market.
Your buyers ask ChatGPT and read the summary above the results. Those tools quote plain factual sentences from sources they trust. Building that in costs nothing now and is painful to retrofit later.
You own the files, the domain and every account. You can add a case study without calling me. If you ever want to move on, you move on, and I hand the lot over without making it awkward.
How it runs
Projects like this rarely go wrong because somebody lacked talent. They go wrong because nobody agreed how it would run, so it drifts, and by the time you notice you are the one holding it together.
So every build follows the same five stages, and nothing moves on to the next one until you have signed off the one before it. That is the whole discipline. It is unglamorous and it is why these finish.
Scope agreed in writing, the domain sorted, a holding page live so the address works from day one, and your portal open.
One call to understand the business, the buyer and the work you want more of. Then you choose a direction from real designs rather than moodboards.
I write every page and send it over for you to mark up. This is the step that decides whether the site works, and it is the one almost everybody skips.
It goes up on a preview link you can watch develop. Enquiry form tested with a real submission, a content system so you can add things yourself, and the search groundwork done rather than promised.
Tested properly on real devices, your changes made, then live. A session so you can run it yourself, and I am still here afterwards.
Two things sit above all of it. You always know where the project is, and you own everything in it at every stage. Not on completion, not once the invoice clears. The domain, the files, the accounts, the brand assets and the words are yours throughout, and if you ever want to take it elsewhere you can, without a difficult conversation.
The portal is what keeps the first of those true. It is not a nice extra. It is the mechanism, and it is the reason you will not have to ask me how it is going.
What it costs
Every project is quoted properly once I understand the scope. This is where a typical build starts, so you can decide right now whether to keep reading.
Plus £50 a month, rolling
The monthly covers hosting, security, backups, updates, monitoring and small changes. It starts at launch, it is rolling, and you can stop it whenever you like.
A UK agency will quote four to ten thousand for the same scope, and the copy, the brand and the search work usually sit on top as extras. The difference is not that you are getting less. It is that there is no agency underneath me taking a cut, and no account manager standing between you and the person doing the work.
Whether it fits
Founders and directors of established businesses who care how things look and are judged on it. People who have built something real, who hold a high standard everywhere else, and who are quietly irritated that this one thing has been allowed to slide.
It is not for you if you want five pages as cheaply and quickly as possible, or if you want to be closely involved in every design decision. Plenty of people do both of those well, and I would rather point you at one of them than take work I am the wrong fit for.
Much of this comes through the consulting side, because the website usually turns out to be a symptom of something we were already talking about.
Half an hour. Tell me what the business does and what the site is failing to do, and you will get a straight answer on whether this is worth your money. If it is, you will come away knowing exactly what it would involve, what it would cost and how it would run.
No charge, no pitch, and no obligation at the end of it.