Websites for small businesses in Barry.
I'm Huw. I build sites for small businesses and sole traders in Barry. I can help acquire and setup your domain, the hosting and your custom email.
It's just me, so you deal with the same person the whole way through.
For most sites I build, there's no ongoing monthly cost once it's live, that includes no hosting cost. You'll see some other agencies charge a monthly ongoing fee to keep your site live, with me, you only pay when you actually need something.
- Where I live
- About 30 minutes from Bridgend
- Also covering
- Barry and the rest of Vale of Glamorgan, including Barry Island, Cadoxton, Sully, Rhoose, Dinas Powys, Wenvoe, Palmerstown, Colcot.
Three towns in one
Barry doesn’t behave like a single place online. There’s the town, Holton Road and the streets round it, where the trade is everyday and local: hairdressers, takeaways, garages, people selling to the same customers for years. There’s Barry Island, seasonal and visitor led, packed on a hot Saturday and quiet in February. And there’s the newer housing down at the Docks and the Waterfront, full of people who moved in recently, know nobody, and find every tradesman by searching for one.
Those three search differently and a lot of sites here are written for only one of them. A plumber whose site is all about Barry town is invisible to somebody who’s moved into a flat at the Waterfront and typed “plumber Barry Docks”.
The new arrivals point is the one worth taking seriously. Barry has a lot of people who’ve come in from Cardiff and further with no local recommendations to fall back on, so the first plumber or groomer they can find and check gets the work.
What people type here
Trade plus place, mostly on a phone. “Emergency electrician Barry”, “car servicing Cadoxton”, “dog groomer near Rhoose”. A fair bit of it uses the district rather than the town, which is why Cadoxton, Sully, Dinas Powys, Wenvoe and the Island are worth having on the page at all. Above the websites sits the map, and for plenty of these searches that map is the whole result as far as the customer’s concerned.
The site I’d build
Static pages, plain HTML, quick on a phone. No page builder, no slider, nothing between somebody and your number. Four or five pages is usually the right size, and I sort the domain, the hosting and the email sat behind it.
Trades in Barry lose work to whoever answers first more than they lose it to anyone’s design, so the enquiry has to reach you the same evening it arrives. If you already use a booking system that works, I’ll point the site at it rather than sell you a replacement.
In person, or on a call
Barry’s about half an hour from me. The first conversation is usually over a video call. If you decide you’d like to hire me, I’ll come to you to work through ideas and look at what you’ve got. If you’d rather do everything over a video call because your day hasn’t got an hour in it, that’s fine and it makes no difference to the work.
Then we usually go on by message, and I can talk you through any of it, from the domain to why a page is slow.
Hosting and email
For most sites I build there's no ongoing hosting cost and no monthly retainer. The domain renews once a year at list price, no commission from me, and it's registered in your name so you can take it elsewhere whenever you want.
Email goes on your own custom domain, setup properly so what you send lands in the inbox rather than the spam folder.
What I'd build for a business in Barry
These read differently depending on the trade, so there's a page for each with the searches your customers make and what the site has to do about them.
See where your site stands first
Put your address into the free check and it tells you where the site's hosted, what it's built with, what a search engine actually gets and whether your email is setup right. Takes about ten seconds, nothing is installed and nothing on your site is touched. Run the free check.
If you'd rather read about how I build first, here's the web design page, and here are five things to ask anyone quoting you. You can also see everywhere else I work.
Tell me what you need in Barry.
Say what you're trying to achieve and I'll tell you what I'd do, including when the answer is you don't need a new site at all.