Web Development

Your website is slow, looks like everyone else's and brings in no enquiries

A small business website has three jobs: to be found, to open properly on a phone, and to make getting in touch the obvious next step. We design and build a site for those three jobs as one piece of work. Web design and web development are quoted together, as a single fixed fee agreed before anything starts. Everything it runs on sits in accounts you own from day one.

Sound familiar?

Three situations that may be yours.

The page that will not load. A customer taps your link from Google on one bar of signal in a car park. The screen stays white, then half a layout jumps into place. They press back and call someone else. You never know they came.

The template everyone bought. Your site came from a theme anyone can buy, so it can look like anyone else's. The business is busy and careful; the website says the opposite.

The site nobody can change. The person who built it registered the domain in their own name and has stopped answering email. Changing your opening hours means asking a favour. Moving to someone else means starting again.

How it works

1. Scope and a fixed quote. Roughly a week or two agreeing the pages, the structure and what each page has to do. The fee and a target date are written into the scope before design starts, rather than estimated by the hour and revised as the project goes.
2. Design. One or two weeks shaping each page around the thing you want a visitor to do next: ring or send an enquiry.
3. Build. Two to six weeks in Next.js and Tailwind, while the last design details are finished. Page size is checked automatically as the site is built. Loading on a phone is measured against a two-second budget: what we build to, not a promise about every phone on every signal.
4. Launch in your accounts. The site goes live in accounts you own, after a manual keyboard pass.
5. Thirty days of aftercare. Fixes, small changes and training for whoever will look after the site.

End to end, we plan a site of five to ten pages at four to eight weeks. Each stage assumes the copy, photographs and approvals it needs are ready; where they are not, the schedule waits on those rather than on the build.

What the starting price buys

A five-page marketing site, designed for your business rather than taken from a theme, built on Next.js and Tailwind. It is set up so Google can read it properly, it works for visitors using a keyboard or screen reader, and it launches into accounts you own with thirty days of aftercare. The copy and photographs come from you; we fit them to the design.

Add when you need it: more pages · a blog · online booking · copywriting · an editor your team can publish from without asking us · location or industry pages · a temporary brand kit (a wordmark, two colours, one typeface) while a proper identity is made elsewhere · a redirect plan for replacing a site that already ranks. Each is quoted on its own before work starts.

Web design agency, freelancer or site builder?

Four honest routes, each right for someone.

Whichever you choose, ask three things of every quote, ours included. Whose name is on the hosting account? Whose name is on the domain and the Search Console property? Could a different developer pick up the site without starting again? For the platform question on its own, custom website vs WordPress compares the numbers.

What keeps you safe

Accessible to WCAG 2.2 AA. Someone on a keyboard or a screen reader can move through the pages and fill in forms. It is checked automatically as the site is built, and by a manual keyboard pass before launch. In Great Britain, the Equality Act 2010 requires service providers to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people, and the EHRC's code of practice says the obligation "also applies to the provision of services on a website". The other rules a business website must meet are in our UK website legal checklist.

Visitors can refuse tracking. The cookie banner makes Reject as easy as Accept.

You keep the asset intact. Hosting, domain, analytics and Search Console are yours from day one, so ending work with us never costs you the site.

Clinic price lists are planned at scope. If your price list names a prescription-only medicine, we agree at scope where it may sit and how visitors reach it. That follows our reading of CAP's guidance as re-read on 28 September 2026, and it is not legal advice. More on websites for aesthetic clinics.

What it costs

From £3,500 as a fixed fee, excl. VAT, agreed before work starts. What moves it: page count, how bespoke the design is, whether your team needs an editor, how many systems the site must talk to, and any add-ons. Published UK agency prices for a standard small-business site run £2,500–£10,000, with London dearer for the same specification. Upkeep after day 30 is a separate care plan from £250 a month, excl. VAT. All starting prices are on the pricing page.

When something else fits better

• Your site is slow and you want to know why before replacing it. A slow site can be carrying scripts and styles it does not need. A free audit gives five prioritised findings on search, speed and conversion before anyone argues about the design. Where the stack is modern, the codebase clean and plugins few, redesigning the visual layer costs less than starting again, and keeping the site you have is a genuine outcome. We do not redesign a WordPress brochure site in place, though a care plan can look after one, and a WooCommerce shop is E-Commerce work.
• The site works but looks a decade old. If the design is the whole job, that is UI / UX Design, scoped and priced on its own.
• You sell products online. An online shop is an E-Commerce project, priced on its own.
• You need to be found for more searches. SEO is scoped separately; a site built properly does not need it in order to work.
• You are still testing the idea, or the budget is under about £1,500. A site builder or a UK freelancer is the better buy, and spending £1,500 well beats spending £3,500 badly.

WebAsk works remotely, with no UK office, for businesses anywhere in the UK. Get in touch with the address of the site you have or a line about the one you need, or read how a project runs first.