Websites for small businesses in Swansea.
I'm Huw. I build sites for small businesses and sole traders in Swansea. 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 40 minutes from Bridgend
- Also covering
- Swansea and the surrounding area, including Mumbles, Uplands, Sketty, Killay, Langland, Bishopston, Gowerton, Morriston, Llansamlet.
Four markets in one city
Swansea isn’t one market. Mumbles trades on visitors and weekends, the seafront and the shops along Newton Road busy in summer and much quieter in January. The Uplands runs on independent cafes, bars and small studios serving people who live within walking distance. Gower is holiday lets, surf, campsites and everything that supports them, scattered across villages with poor signal and no passing trade at all. Morriston and Llansamlet are trade and industrial, where the customer is often another business.
Those need different websites, and the commonest mistake I see is a Gower or Mumbles business writing pages aimed at the whole city. A cafe in Mumbles gets nothing out of being findable in Morriston. Being the first thing a visitor sees when they search from a car park by the front is worth a lot.
Gower has the sharpest version of it. Visitors search from a phone, somewhere the connection is bad, for something they want in the next hour. A site with a video header and a slider is unusable in Rhossili. A plain page with your hours, what you do and a tappable phone number gets used.
What people type, and where they see the answer
Place plus what they want, and the place is usually a small one. “Coffee Mumbles”, “physio Sketty”, “hairdresser Uplands”, “dog friendly pub Gower”. The results start with a map of three businesses, so for a visitor business the map is most of the game and the website is what confirms it.
What I’d put on it
Plain HTML pages with the words already in them and no page builder underneath. Four or five usually covers it, and I sort the domain, the hosting and the email behind them.
Photographers and anything selling on how it looks need the images handled properly or the gallery sits blank for five seconds on hotel wifi. Food and hospitality need the menu readable on a phone, which a photo of a chalk board never is. And if you’re renting out a cottage or a flat and already listing on a booking platform, I’ll usually tell you to keep it and link the site to it rather than take money off you to rebuild booking and payments badly.
Forty minutes down the motorway
Far enough that I won’t pretend I’ll be popping in every week. I’ll come out for the first proper conversation if you want it in person, and after that we work by video call and messages, which for most jobs is quicker for both of us anyway.
If something breaks in a year you’re messaging the person who built it, not a support queue.
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 Swansea
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 Swansea.
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.