Web design · Brighton
Web design in Brighton, from someone who does the SEO too.
Brighton is the hardest market in the South East to stand out in on looks alone. Everyone here has a good-looking website. Far fewer have one built so it can actually be found.
Werehouse Media is a one-person, SEO-led web design studio working with Brighton and Hove businesses. The same person does the design, the copy, the build and the search work, so decisions that affect ranking, page structure, headings, image weight and load speed, are made once by someone who understands all of them. Single-page sites start at £495. Most multi-page builds land between £1,795 upwards, with the timeline agreed at quote stage: days for a single page, weeks for a multi-page build, longer for anything with heavy custom interactivity. Standalone search work on a site somebody else built is sold as a one-off: an audit and fix list at £495, or local foundations at £995. Clients own the domain, the code and every account outright, and no retainer has a lock-in. Brighton is close enough for in-person meetings and photography days, though the whole process runs perfectly well on calls and a private preview link.
The market here
Brighton has more good websites per square mile than anywhere outside London.
Brighton and Hove's digital sector is worth over a billion pounds a year and employs somewhere north of twelve thousand people. The wider creative-tech cluster runs to more than fifteen hundred businesses. That has a specific consequence for anyone trying to get found here: your customers are design-literate, your competitors are design-literate, and a handsome website is the price of entry rather than an advantage.
What that means in practice is that the differentiator has moved. In a town where the average small-business site already looks decent, the sites that win enquiries are the ones with a real page for every service they sell, headings that match what people actually type, a Google Business Profile that is filled in properly, and a load time that does not collapse on 4G in the North Laine. Those are structural decisions, not aesthetic ones, and they are the ones most Brighton studios sell you separately afterwards.
The other Brighton-specific thing worth naming: a lot of local agencies are staffed by very good designers who subcontract the search work, or skip it. You end up paying agency rates for a site that then needs an SEO budget on top to be found. Doing both in one head is cheaper and it produces a more coherent result, because the page structure gets decided by someone who knows what it has to rank for.
Who I build for in Brighton
Four kinds of business, four different jobs.
01
Independent retail and hospitality
The Lanes, North Laine, Kemptown and the seafront.
Opening hours, menus and booking that work on a phone held in one hand, and a Google Business Profile that carries the weight, because for a walk-in business the profile brings more people through the door than the website does.
02
Studios, freelancers and small agencies
Designers, photographers, developers and consultants.
The classic Brighton problem: a beautiful portfolio site that ranks for nothing and qualifies nobody. Usually fixed by adding real service pages and making the enquiry form ask two more questions.
03
Wellness, therapy and private practice
Clinics, therapists, dentists and practitioners.
A page per treatment rather than one services list, published prices where the regulator allows it, and a booking route that does not depend on somebody answering the phone.
04
Trades and home services
Brighton, Hove, Portslade, Shoreham, Lewes and the surrounding villages.
A page for each town you send a van to, the right Google category, and a service area drawn properly instead of left as a single pin on the seafront.
The search reality
What ranking in Brighton actually takes
| Factor | How it works in Brighton | What to do about it |
|---|---|---|
| Competition level | High. Brighton has one of the densest concentrations of digital and creative firms in the country, and a lot of them rank for the obvious terms. | Go narrower and more specific. "Web design Brighton" is a long war. "Shopify developer Hove" or "physiotherapist Kemptown" is a winnable one. |
| Google Business Profile | Decisive for anything with a premises or a service area, and more so here because the map pack takes up most of a phone screen. | Correct primary category, real service list, twenty-plus photographs, and a steady trickle of reviews rather than fifteen in one week. |
| Local link sources | Brighton has unusually good ones: local press, sector directories, independent guides, event listings. | Get listed properly where your competitors already are, then earn mentions by being genuinely useful to a local audience. |
| Mobile performance | Brighton traffic skews heavily mobile, and seafront and Lanes signal is patchy. | Sub-second loads on a real phone, not a 95 in a lab. Self-hosted fonts, no page-builder bloat, images sized for the slot they sit in. |
What it costs
Prices do not change with your postcode.
Every project is quoted in writing before anything starts. There is no hourly meter and no surprise invoice at the end.
- Single-page site, from £495. Usually a placeholder for something bigger later, or a business that genuinely only needs one page.
- Multi-page build, £1,795 upwards. Most Brighton projects land here. Timeline agreed at quote stage, unlimited revisions between the first and final draft.
- Complex builds with custom animation, five figures. Longer timeline, quoted properly.
- Search and AI visibility audit, on application. A one-off look at what is holding an existing site back on Google and in AI answers, with a prioritised list.
- Local SEO foundations, £995. One-off project: Google Business Profile, town and service pages, technical fixes.
- Search groundwork, included in every build. Technical SEO, structured data, fast pages and a properly configured Google Business Profile, done once and done right rather than billed monthly.
- Brand kits from £895. Automation priced on application. Website care from £49 a month.
A third books the work, a third on the first draft, the balance before launch. Every build includes thirty days of post-launch fixes and reasonable tweaks.
Read this before you enquire
When I am not the right choice
Being outside Brighton is not a good reason to rule me out. These are.
- You need a team with cover. One person means one holiday, one bout of flu and a limited number of builds at a time. If you need a guaranteed response time, buy an agency.
- You want a stripped-down version of a bigger build. There is a proper single-page site from £495 and I will point you at it when it fits. I will not quote a thinned-out multi-page build that does half of each job.
- You want the phone ringing within a fortnight. A page can be live in days, but search work is measured in months. If next week is the deadline, spend the money on Google Ads.
- You want to sit in an office and point at a screen. The process runs on calls, email and shared drafts, with meetings in person by arrangement.
Brighton questions
Straight answers.
Yes. Brighton and Hove are close enough that a kick-off meeting or a photography day is easy to arrange, and I do it fairly often. It is never required. The build itself runs on a call, a private preview link and email, and the site performs identically either way.
Because most of them are designers who buy in or skip the search work, and most SEO firms here do not design. If you want one person accountable for whether the site looks right and whether it gets found, that is the whole pitch. If you want a team, an account manager and a creative director, a Brighton agency is genuinely the better buy and I will say so.
Appearing at all takes days. Meaningful movement on competitive Brighton terms takes three to six months, and anyone promising page one in thirty days in this market is selling you something. Local map results move faster than organic listings, which is why the Google Business Profile work comes first.
Yes, and it is a decent share of the work. Audit at £495, local foundations as a one-off project at £995, or the groundwork included in a build. If your current site is structurally sound there is no reason to rebuild it, and I will tell you if that is the case.
Worth reading next
Written for business owners, not web designers.
Next step
Tell me what you sell in Brighton.
You will get an honest answer, a fixed price, and no follow-up sequence pestering you for a fortnight.