Services
Six things, done properly.
Buy the whole build, or buy one piece. Plenty of clients come for SEO on a site somebody else made, or a brand kit before they are ready for a website at all. Both are normal ways to start.
A Werehouse Media website build covers strategy, interface design, copywriting, hand-coded pages, conversion rate optimisation, SEO groundwork and launch, all done by one person, Ed, working from England. Layouts are genuinely responsive, designed at real sizes on real content and checked on real devices rather than a desktop design squeezed down at the end, and the page order, layout and form design are set to convert rather than only to rank. Search work covers Google and the answer engines together: generative engine optimisation for ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot is included in every engagement rather than billed separately. A single page starts at £495 and is finished in days. A multi-page site runs £1,795 upwards, with the timeline agreed at quote stage, and the price is fixed in writing before anything starts. The other services are priced separately: Search groundwork included in every build., redesigns from £795, brand kits from £895, automation priced on application, and website care from £49 a month with no contract.
Web design & build
What does a website build actually include?
Every page has a job, and on most small-business sites that job is a call, a form or a booking. I design backwards from that, then hand-code it so it loads fast enough to keep the person who tapped it.
Designed in the browser
You see the homepage early, at real sizes, with your real words in it, not a flat picture of a website in a PDF.
Hand-coded on a professional stack
Astro and Tailwind, GSAP for motion, Git version control and automated Netlify deploys. Real tooling where it earns its place, and no theme or plugin stack sitting in your admin waiting to break on an update.
Copywriting included
I interview you for an hour and write it. Nobody enjoys being sent a blank document titled "your website text".
SEO built in from day one
Keyword and intent mapping decides the page structure before anything is designed. Schema, meta and internal links are part of the build.
90+ Lighthouse or it does not ship
Measured on a draft deploy on real hosting, on mobile, not on my laptop.
You own everything
Domain, code and content. If you leave, nothing stops working.
Website redesign
Should you redesign or rebuild?
For sites that look dated, load slowly, or quietly lose customers. The risk with a redesign is throwing away the rankings you already have, so the redirect map and content audit come before the design.
Baseline first
I record what currently ranks, converts and earns links, so we can prove afterwards whether the new site did better.
One-to-one redirect map
Every old URL points at its new equivalent. No chains, and never everything dumped on the homepage.
Content preserved, not tidied away
The pages that rank usually rank because of words somebody wants to cut for being "too long".
A dip is normal, a crash is not
I will tell you what a normal two-week wobble looks like so you are not panicking at it.
Workflow automation
What can workflow automation actually take off you?
The quiet money-saver. Most small businesses lose more to unanswered enquiries and unchased quotes than to anything a marketing budget could fix.
Enquiry capture and routing
Straight to the right place, with an instant acknowledgement that buys you time to reply properly.
Quote follow-up
The single highest-return automation for trades. Most quotes are lost to silence, not to price.
Review requests
Timed to job completion, when goodwill is highest. This is what actually grows a Google profile.
Reporting that assembles itself
One monthly note with the three numbers that matter, sent without anyone remembering to make it.
What I will not automate
Complaints, first contact with a high-value client, anything needing judgement. A wrong automated message costs more than it saves.
AI search
How do you get named when someone asks an AI?
Customers have started asking ChatGPT and Perplexity for recommendations instead of scrolling a results page. Generative engine optimisation is the work of being one of the businesses it names. It is part of every search engagement here, at no extra cost.
Indexed where the engines actually look
ChatGPT and Copilot retrieve from Bing, so a site missing from Bing is invisible to both however well it ranks on Google. Submitting it through Bing Webmaster Tools is free and takes ten minutes, and most sites I audit have never done it.
Answer crawlers allowed, deliberately
The crawlers that build answers are not the crawlers that train models, and the difference matters. Both OpenAI and Perplexity publish which of theirs is which. You can block training and keep visibility. One stale line in robots.txt blocks both.
Pages written to be quoted
An engine lifts passages, so each page answers its question outright near the top, with real figures and sources. Citing sources, adding statistics and adding quotations were the three strongest levers in the KDD 2024 study of how generative engines pick what to quote.
Checked by hand, monthly
There is no Search Console for AI answers yet. Ten real questions go to ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity each month and you get the list of who was named. Small sample, honestly labelled.
Website care
Do you need a care plan after launch?
Optional, cancellable, and genuinely not necessary for everyone. If your site is static and you never change it, you may not need this at all. I will say so.
Basic, £49/month
Hosting, SSL, backups, uptime monitoring, security patching, and small text or image swaps.
Standard, £79/month
Everything in Basic, plus an hour of changes a month and quarterly performance checks.
Plus, £149/month
Everything in Standard, plus three hours of changes, content updates and priority response.
The alternatives
Who should you actually hire to build it?
Five routes a UK small business realistically chooses between. The figures for the other four are typical published UK rates rather than a strawman. All ex-VAT.
| Route | Typical cost | What you actually get | Who it suits | The tradeoff |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DIY site builder Wix, Squarespace |
£150 to £600 a year | A template, an editor, hosting and SSL. You make every design decision and write every word. | Pre-revenue ideas, and anyone testing whether the demand is there before spending on a build. | Your own evenings, for weeks, and a layout plenty of other firms are running too. |
| Freelancer | £800 to £3,000 one-off | At £800, a template with your logo dropped in. At £3,000, somebody who plans before building. | Owners with a clear written brief who can judge design work and project-manage it themselves. | The widest quality range of any route, and the quote will not tell you which end you have bought. |
| One-person studio This is Werehouse Media |
From £495 for a single page, £1,795 upwards multi-page | Strategy, copy written from an hour-long interview, bespoke hand-coded pages, SEO groundwork, launch. Same person throughout. | Owner-managed businesses that want enquiries from search and a fixed number in writing first. | One person, so there is a queue. You may wait two or three weeks for a start date, and there is no cover if I am ill. |
| Mid-sized agency | £8,000 to £25,000 | A designer, a developer, an account manager and a project manager, plus cover when one of them is off sick. | Companies with a marketing lead, several internal stakeholders and a formal sign-off process. | Part of the fee coordinates people you may not need. Two vans and a mobile number do not need that structure. |
| Large agency | £25,000 and up | Discovery phases, custom platforms, procurement, contractual response times, named support. | Organisations building a platform rather than a website, with legal and IT sign-off to satisfy. | Months before anything is live, and every change goes through a process instead of a person. |
Be honest with yourself
When this is not for you.
Five situations where I would rather lose the enquiry than take the money. If one of these is you, the right answer is somewhere else on this page or on somebody else's.
You want a multi-page site on a single-page budget
Under £1,000, the honest answer is one page done properly at £495, not six pages done thinly. If you need all six live now, build it yourself on Squarespace for a year and come back when the site is earning enough to justify the build.
You want a large team on the account
You get one person. That is the point, and it is also the limit. If your project needs a project manager, a separate designer, a separate developer and a formal procurement trail, an agency is the right call and will not be a rip-off at the price they quote.
You need cover, not a person
One person takes a handful of builds at a time, and one person goes on holiday. There is no support rota, no two-hour response, and sometimes a wait of a few weeks for a start date. An agency at £8,000 upwards sells you exactly that cover and is worth the money if you need it.
Your work already arrives by word of mouth
If the phone rings without Google doing any of the work, your next £500 does more in reviews, photographs and your Google Business Profile than in a rebuild. Come back when search is where the next customer has to come from.
You need a shop with hundreds of products or a customer login
Large catalogues, stock syncing with a system you already run, and portals where customers log in are a team's job. I will say no rather than learn on your budget.
Next step
Let's see if I can help.
Tell me what the business does and what you want more of. Honest answer, fixed price, no follow-up sequence.