'How much?' is the first question almost every joiner, builder and fitter asks us, usually before they've told us anything about the business. It's the right question. The frustrating part is that most web designers won't answer it until you've sat through a call.
So here's the straight version: what we charge, what makes that number go up, what you'll pay once the site is live, and three sites we've built for trade businesses, so you can see what the money actually buys.
The short answer
Our websites start at £1,079. That buys a properly designed, hand-built site that loads fast on a phone, tells people what you do and where, shows your work, and makes it easy to ring or send an enquiry. For a lot of sole traders and small firms, that's the whole job.
Every project gets a fixed price in writing before any work starts, so the number you agree is the number you pay.
What moves the price up
- The number of pages. A one-page site for a sole trader is a different job from a site with a page for every service and every area you cover.
- Different buyers. If you sell to homeowners and to housebuilders or commercial clients, each needs its own argument, which means more design and more writing.
- What the site has to do. A contact form is simple. Online payments, bookings, logins or a dashboard for your clients are real software, and are quoted on what they involve.
- Photos and words. If you can hand over good photos and the details of your jobs, it costs less than if we're writing everything and taking the pictures.
What doesn't change the price much is how fancy you want it to look. Good design for a trade business is mostly clarity, and clarity isn't the expensive part.
What you'll pay after it's live
This is where a lot of trade businesses get caught out: a cheap site with a monthly fee that never ends, or a builder platform that switches the site off the day you stop paying.
- A domain name. A .co.uk costs roughly £10 to £20 a year, and it should be registered in your name, not your web designer's.
- Hosting. A fast, simple site costs very little to host, and with us the hosting is set up in your name too.
- No monthly lock-in. You own the site outright, code and hosting, and you're free to take it anywhere.
If you want someone to keep working on getting you found on Google after launch, that's optional and separate: our SEO work starts at £200 a month. Plenty of trade businesses don't need it on day one.
Three trade websites we've built
The quickest way to judge a price is to see what it bought. These are three trade businesses we've built for this year.
D. Callaghan Joiners & Builders: a family-run Bathgate firm, trading since 1974 on fifty years of word of mouth. A photography-led site that shows the joinery, the building and the steel as one team, built around eleven real jobs.
Brodie Bespoke Bathrooms: a bathroom fitter in Armadale selling to two very different buyers, families replacing their only bathroom and housebuilders pricing forty plots. One site that argues both, plus a way to send a photo on WhatsApp and get a ballpark price back.
Northbound Projects: a refurbishment firm working across Glasgow and the Central Belt. Separate ways in for developers, landlords, homeowners and commercial clients, a process written down in plain English, and a live project dashboard once work starts.
Those three needed very different things from a website, which is exactly why every job is quoted on what it has to do rather than sold as a package.
A cheap website that doesn't make the phone ring is the expensive one.
How to compare quotes
- Ask who owns the site and the hosting at the end. If the answer isn't you, find out what happens when you stop paying.
- Ask whether the price is fixed, and what counts as extra.
- Ask to see sites they've built for businesses like yours, and open them on your phone.
- Ask what happens after launch: who changes a phone number, and what that costs.
Get a price for yours
If you'd like a real number rather than a starting point, tell us about the business: what you do, where you work, and who you want to hear from. We'll come back with a fixed quote, or tell you straight if something simpler would suit you better.