A website that earns its place.

I build sites by hand rather than assembling them out of a page builder. That is not purism — it is that a hand-built page loads in a fraction of the time, has nothing on it to keep patched, and does not quietly break the week the theme author stops maintaining it.

The process is deliberately front-loaded. By the time anything looks like a website, the hard decisions are already made.

• 01What the site is for. Enquiries, bookings, credibility before a phone call, or selling directly. These want genuinely different sites, and picking one is the most useful hour we will spend.
• 02Structure. What pages exist and what each one is supposed to make someone do. A business with five real services needs five pages that can be found individually, not one page with five paragraphs on it — that distinction is most of the difference between being findable and not.
• 03Words. I will draft them if you would rather not, but they have to sound like you. I would rather have your plain description of what you do than something polished that could describe anyone.
• 04The build. Responsive from the start, tested on real phone widths rather than a desktop browser squeezed narrow. Keyboard navigable, readable contrast, proper heading structure — which matters for people using screen readers and, conveniently, is the same thing search engines read.
• 05Findability. Descriptive page titles, honest meta descriptions, structured data so Google understands what kind of business you are, an XML sitemap, and clean URLs. None of this is a trick; it is just doing the basics that most sites skip.
• 06Launch and after. SSL, analytics with a working cookie consent banner, forms that actually deliver to your inbox, and the site registered with Google Search Console so you can see what people searched for to find you.

A website you cannot move, cannot edit and do not own is a rental, not an asset. Everything I build is handed over in full.

• —The domain registered in your name, with the login details, not mine.
• —The complete source files, so any developer alive can pick it up.
• —Hosting with SSL, backups and updates handled — or pointed at your own host if you prefer.
• —Google Search Console and analytics set up and explained, so you can see what is actually happening.
• —A short written guide to the things you will want to change yourself.

Do you use WordPress?

Only when there is a reason to — usually a blog someone will genuinely keep updating, or a shop. For a business site of a handful of pages, WordPress means a database, a theme, a stack of plugins and a permanent patching job, all to serve pages that never change. Hand-built HTML is faster, safer and cheaper to run.

Can I edit it myself?

Depends what you want to edit. Prices, opening hours and text, yes — I will set that up so it is straightforward. Rebuilding the layout, no, and honestly that is where most self-edited sites come apart. Text changes are usually a WhatsApp message away anyway.

Will it rank on Google?

The build will not hold it back, and I will set up the fundamentals properly. But ranking comes from having pages that genuinely answer what people search for, plus a Google Business Profile if you serve a local area. I will tell you what that involves rather than promise you page one.

Do I have to move my hosting to you?

No. I host sites because it removes a whole category of problem for people who do not want to think about it, but if you already have hosting you are happy with, I will build for that instead.

I'm not sure I need a new site.

Then say so and I will look at the one you have for free. Quite often the answer is that the site is fine and the actual problem is that nothing links to it, or that it takes eleven seconds to load on a phone. Those are much smaller jobs.