Websites for small businesses in Neath.
I'm Huw. I build sites for small businesses and sole traders in Neath. 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 35 minutes from Bridgend
- Also covering
- Neath and the rest of Neath Port Talbot, including Briton Ferry, Skewen, Bryncoch, Cimla, Tonna, Resolven, Glynneath, Crynant, Seven Sisters.
A market town with two valleys running off it
Neath is a working town with a market in the middle of it and a lot of small businesses that have traded for decades on reputation. Round it sit Briton Ferry, Skewen, Bryncoch and Cimla, and behind it the Vale of Neath runs up through Tonna, Resolven and Glynneath towards waterfall country, with the Dulais valley going off through Crynant and Seven Sisters.
That spread is the thing to design for. A trade based in Neath is regularly working thirty minutes up a valley, and the customer in Glynneath wants to know you’ll come that far before they ring. The top of the valley gets walkers and visitors all year for the waterfalls, and they find everything by searching from a phone with one bar.
Most businesses I talk to in a town like this have a solid local reputation and nothing at all beyond it. Fine until the recommendation goes wrong. Somebody gets your name, half remembers it, searches it and lands on a directory page with your old number on it. Owning what comes up when someone searches your own name is the cheapest win going.
Trade plus village
“Roofer Skewen”, “plumber Glynneath”, “garage Briton Ferry”. Above the websites there’s a map of three businesses, and for most of these searches that map is the whole result as far as the customer’s concerned. What the person in Resolven is really asking is whether you’d drive that far up the valley, and seeing their village named answers it before they ring.
What goes on the pages
Three to five, plain HTML, words in the file rather than fetched once it gets there. Signal up the valleys is patchy so the pages have to work on barely any connection, which rules out page builders, sliders and a screen full of tracking scripts.
I sort the domain, the hosting and the email behind it, and make sure enquiries land somewhere you’ll see them, since a lot of them arrive in the evening and whoever replies first tends to get the job. If the real problem is that the Google listing is wrong and the site’s fine, I’ll tell you that instead of selling you a rebuild.
Thirty-five minutes up the road
I’ll drive over for the first proper conversation if you’d rather do it face to face, and for anything that’s easier looked at together. Otherwise a video call covers it, and most of the work after that first conversation happens by message anyway.
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 Neath
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 Neath.
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.