Why does your business need a website?

Somebody gets your name from a neighbour, a local Facebook group, or the side of your van. Almost nobody rings straight away. They search the name first, and whatever comes back is your interview.

If the top result is a page last updated in 2023, a directory listing with your old mobile number, or nothing at all, the conversation usually ends there. They go back to the search results, where three competitors are waiting with prices, photos and a contact form. Nobody emails to tell you that you lost that job, which is exactly why it's so easy to believe it isn't happening.

A website doesn't win you customers by existing. It stops you losing the ones you've already earned by word of mouth.

We'd rather say this than sell you something you'll resent paying for. If you're a sole trader, booked three months ahead, taking work only from referrals, and you don't want to grow, a website will sit there being tidy and won't change much.

Set up a Google Business Profile instead. It's free, it takes an afternoon, and it's what appears in the map results when someone searches for your trade near them. Add photos of real jobs, your hours, your service area, and ask your last ten happy customers for a review. For a lot of local trades that's the single highest return hour you'll spend all year.

Come back to a website when you want more work than the phone brings in, when you're competing on something other than being the cheapest, when you're repeating the same answers to the same questions every day, or when you want to sell something that doesn't require you to be standing there.

Work out what one customer is worth to you over a year. A fitted kitchen might be £6,000. A retainer client might be £300 a month. A haircut might be £25, but the same person twelve times.

Then compare that to the cost of the site. Ours start at no build fee at all for a straightforward brochure site: you host with us for the first year at £45 a month, which is £540, and after twelve months the source code is yours. Sites that need a database, online payments, bookings or customer logins start from £500 on top.

If one extra job a year covers it, the decision is easy. If it would take thirty extra jobs, be sceptical, and spend the money on whatever brings you the first thirty instead. That's the sum we'd do in your position, and it's the sum we'll do with you on a call even when the answer is "not yet".

Northbytes is two people in Kent. Piers came out of law, so contracts, data protection and looking after a client's interests are instincts rather than afterthoughts. Lucas writes the code, all of it, which means the person you talk to about your site is the person building it. There's no account manager in between adding a week to every question.

Every site we build is written by a developer rather than dragged out of a template, and the things that get sold as extras elsewhere are standard here: fast loading, technical SEO, accessible markup, and a design that belongs to you rather than to a theme forty thousand other businesses also bought.

Our prices sit deliberately between a £15-a-month website builder and a £10,000 agency quote. The reason we can do that is boring: our developers use current AI tooling for the mechanical parts of the work and their own judgement for everything that matters, so you aren't billed for the slow bits. Every line still gets reviewed and owned by an engineer, and you get a fixed quote before any work starts.