Built for the phone first
Designed and tested at 360 pixels wide, then allowed to grow into a real desktop layout — not a stretched mobile one with the columns spread out.
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Web design & build
Small sites for small businesses, written as plain files rather than assembled out of a page builder. Fast because there is almost nothing to them, and quiet because there is nothing to keep updating.
01 How it is built
“Static” means the page is already finished before anybody asks for it.
Your site is a set of completed files sitting on a server. Somebody visits, the server hands over the file, the browser draws it. That is the entire transaction.
The alternative — which is what most small business sites are — builds the page from scratch on every single visit, out of a database, a theme, and eight or ten plugins. That is a lot of machinery for a page which says exactly the same thing today as it did yesterday. It also has to be kept patched by somebody, and when nobody does, that machinery is the way in.
None of that is a criticism of anyone who has one. It is the normal thing to end up with. It is just more moving parts than a joiner in Aylsham needs to publish a phone number and a list of what he does.
What that gets you
- It is fast without being optimised. There is no clever caching layer, because there is nothing slow to cache.
- Nothing to update. No plugin notifications, no version warnings, no site that breaks because something auto-updated on a Sunday.
- Very little to attack. No login page, no database, no admin panel. A file server handing over files.
- No cookie banner, because there are no cookies to consent to.
- Portable. The site is a folder. You can take it to any host, or to anyone else, and it will work.
02 What a build includes
The standard I hold every page to, whether or not anybody asks.
Readable by everyone
Proper heading structure, text contrast that meets WCAG AA, a visible outline when you tab through with a keyboard, and animation that respects the setting on your phone that turns it off.
Small on purpose
Fonts and images served from your own site rather than pulled in from elsewhere. No third party gets to slow your page down or watch your visitors.
Written to be found
Titles, descriptions, a sitemap and structured business details, so that search engines and Google's business listing agree about who you are and where you are.
HTTPS, renewing itself
A certificate from the first minute, set to renew on its own. No annual reminder and no browser warning appearing one morning without notice.
Yours to take away
The finished site is a folder of files. If you ever want to move it, or hand it to someone else, you copy the folder. There is no lock-in because there is nothing to lock.
03 What it costs
Two fixed prices, and a quote for anything bigger.
One page is £99. Six pages is £249. Both are one-off, both are custom built rather than dropped into a template, and both include the files at the end — they are yours to keep, move or hand to somebody else.
Those two sizes cover most of what a small business genuinely needs. Beyond six pages it stops being the same job twice — eleven pages that still need writing is a different fortnight to six you have already written — so anything larger is quoted by email before a line of it is built.
Tell me roughly what you need and you get a figure and a date back. If what you actually want is the £99 one-pager, I will say so rather than quote you for something bigger.
Published prices
- One-page site
- £99 one-off, files included
- Six-page site
- £249 one-off, files included
- Hosted by me
- £15 a month. Live at once on a preview address; moving it to your own domain is included, whenever you want it
- Onto your hosting
- £49 one-off, only if you would rather host it yourself
- Local SEO
- Quoted by email — see Local SEO
- Anything larger
- Quoted by email
Prices are in pounds sterling. Albek Marketing Ltd is not currently VAT registered, so there is no VAT to add.
04 Boundaries
Two things I will not take on.
Online shops are a different trade — stock, payments, VAT and returns are a proper job in themselves, and there are people who do it properly. And I will not sell you search engine optimisation as a monthly retainer or promise you a position in Google's results, because nobody can honestly deliver that.
Anything else, ask. If it is not my job, I will say so in the first email rather than the fourth.
05 Next
Tell me what you need, in a couple of sentences.
You do not need a specification. What the business does, roughly how many pages, and whether the words already exist is plenty to quote from.
Useful to include
- What the business does, in one line
- Your current website address, if there is one
- Roughly how many pages you think you need
- Whether the wording already exists somewhere
- Any date you are working towards