Web Design in Dorset
We design and build websites for independent businesses across Dorset and Somerset, from a studio on South Street in Sherborne. Shopify for e-commerce as well as Webflow, Framer and Squarespace sites for alternative requirements. A typical project runs from £2,000 to £8,000 and takes four to ten weeks. You own the site at the end and you can edit it yourself.
What we build
- Websites. Brochure and marketing sites for businesses that need to look credible and get found. Built on Webflow / Frame / Squarespace, structured for search from the first wireframe rather than optimised afterwards.
- Shopify. Product stores where the checkout has to work as hard as the design does. Theme customisation through to bespoke builds.
- Landing pages. Single pages built around one campaign and one action, usually to feed paid advertising.
- UX and wireframes. The structure before the styling. What goes on which page, in what order, and what you want someone to do.
- E-commerce. Product data, variants, shipping logic, payment. The unglamorous half that determines whether the shop actually works.
What it costs
A website for a Dorset small business typically runs £2,000 to £8,000. That covers most of what we build: a well-structured marketing site or a straightforward Shopify store, designed properly, built properly, handed over.
Below £2,000 you're buying a template with your logo dropped into it. Above £8,000 usually means custom functionality, a large product catalogue, integrations with systems you already run, or a site in several languages.
What pushes a project up the range: the number of unique page templates, whether e-commerce is involved and how many products, whether the content already exists or needs writing, and whether you need photography shooting alongside the build.
Hosting on Webflow / Framer / Squarespace is separate and paid directly to that platform not to us with a margin on top. Shopify the same. You'll know what those cost before you commit, and if you ever leave, the bill doesn't change.
Which platform, honestly
We build on various platforms, and we'll help guide you to the sutible platform.
These platforms suit almost all businesses. Fast, secure, no plugin maintenance, and you can edit text and images yourself without touching the design.
Shopify handles payments, inventory, shipping and tax without anyone having to build those systems from scratch. It works just as well for a first product launch as it does for businesses turning over millions, which is the argument for starting on it rather than migrating to it later once the shop has outgrown something simpler. There's a platform fee from day one, paid directly to Shopify rather than through us.
WordPress isn't where we start new projects. Plenty of businesses already have one though, and a site that needs fixing doesn't always need replacing. We take on existing WordPress sites for development work, updates, new pages, performance and general maintenance. If you're weighing a rebuild against improving what you've already got, we'll give you a straight view on which is the better spend, including when the answer is to leave it alone.
We've written the longer comparison if you want to think it through before speaking to anyone. Read Webflow vs WordPress vs Squarespace for a UK small business.
You own it, and you can edit it
The site is owned by your account, not ours. Billing in your name, logins in your possession, and if you decide to work with somebody else you take the whole thing with you and nothing breaks.
This matters more than it sounds. A common arrangement locally is that the agency hosts the site on their own account and charges a monthly fee that covers hosting plus a margin plus not much else. It works fine until you want to leave, at which point you discover that leaving means starting again.
You'll also get shown how to update it. Shopify's editor handles text, images and blog posts without any risk of breaking the layout, and most clients are comfortable with it after a half hour walkthrough. We're happy to do the updates if you'd rather, but it should be a choice rather than a dependency.
How long it takes
Four to ten weeks for most projects. A landing page is faster. A large e-commerce build with product photography is longer.
The timeline is rarely limited by design or build. It's limited by content. Copy, product information, images and sign-off are the things that stall projects, so we scope those at the start and tell you exactly what we need from you and when. Projects where one person can approve things move roughly twice as fast as projects that go to a committee.
When a rebuild isn't the answer
Sometimes the site isn't the problem.
If you're getting traffic and no enquiries, that can be a website issue, but it's just as often a photography issue, a pricing issue, or a mismatch between what your advertising promises and what the page delivers. Rebuilding won't fix any of those, and you'll have spent the budget finding out.
If you're getting no traffic at all, a new site won't generate any on its own. That's a search and content problem, and it needs a different spend.
And if the site is two years old, structurally sound and just looks tired, a design refresh on the existing build is usually a fraction of the cost of starting again. We'll say so.
What happens after launch
Launch is the start of the useful data, not the end of the project. Most sites need adjusting once real people are using them rather than once we think they're finished.
If the site is new and there's no brand behind it yet, branding comes first. Building a site around an identity that changes six weeks later means paying for the design twice.
If the site is built and nobody's finding it, that's SEO. If you need traffic faster than search can deliver, that's paid advertising. If the products are photographed badly, no amount of design work will rescue the page, and that's photography.
See the work
Websites, e-commerce and landing pages for independent brands across Dorset, Somerset and further afield. View our work.
