Websites for small businesses in Maesteg.
I'm Huw. I build sites for small businesses and sole traders in Maesteg. 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 20 minutes from Bridgend
- Also covering
- Maesteg and the rest of Bridgend County Borough, including Nantyffyllon, Caerau, Garth, Llangynwyd, Cwmfelin, Pontrhydycyff, Coytrahen, Bryn.
A high street that still works
Maesteg has a proper town centre, the town hall at the top of it, a market, and shops owned by whoever’s stood behind the counter. Behind it the Llynfi valley runs up through Nantyffyllon, Caerau and Garth, with Llangynwyd and Cwmfelin off to the side.
Most businesses here sell to the valley first and the rest of the county second, and that matters online more than people think. Somebody in Caerau searching for a roofer gets the same results as somebody in Bridgend town. A customer up in Garth wants to know you’ll come up there, because plenty of firms quote the valley and never turn up.
Word of mouth does most of the work here and that’s fine, the website isn’t there to replace it. It’s there to catch the half of the recommendation that gets lost. Someone gets your name in the pub, forgets the number, searches it three days later and finds a dead Facebook page and a directory listing you never signed up to.
Two kinds of search
Your name, from somebody who was told about you. And the trade plus the place, from somebody starting cold: “roofer Maesteg”, “mobile mechanic Llynfi valley”, “hairdresser Caerau”. The first one is about owning your own name so it doesn’t lead anywhere stale. The second is about the village names, Nantyffyllon, Caerau, Garth, Llangynwyd, being somewhere findable at all. Reviews are worth chasing here more than most places, small enough town that people recognise the names in them.
What I’d put up
Small and quick. Three or four pages of plain HTML with the words already in them, nothing generated by a page builder. Signal in parts of the valley is not brilliant, so anything that downloads half a megabyte of scripts before it shows a phone number is losing you calls.
For a builder or a roofer the photos do more than any wording, and I take what’s on your phone and handle them properly. Then the domain, the hosting and the email, and an enquiry that actually reaches you, because whoever replies first usually wins them.
If what you need is the Google listing fixed and nothing else, I’ll say that and we can leave the website alone.
Coming up the valley
Twenty minutes up the road, so the first meeting is in person, at your place or in town. I’d rather look at what you’ve got in front of me than have it described over email, the old site, the domain, the email, the photos on your phone.
After that it’s messages and calls, and I’ll come back up when there’s something to look at together.
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 Maesteg
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 Maesteg.
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.