Custom Web Design Services
A site designed around how your buyers actually decide, rather than around whatever layout the theme came with. Built to be edited by you, and to load fast enough that nobody leaves before it does.
First, the honest bit
Plenty of businesses are served perfectly well by a good template, and we'd rather tell you that on a call than take the project and have you wonder later what you paid the difference for.
Stay on a template
Go custom
If you're not sure which side you're on, that's a fifteen minute conversation and not a sales process. We've told people to keep their existing site and spend the money elsewhere, and it usually turns out to be the right advice.
How pages get designed
Design decisions come from the order people need information in, not from what looks balanced in a mockup. Here's the reasoning behind a typical service page layout.
Above the fold
The problem
What you do about it
Objections
Close
Visitors decide whether they're in the right place in a few seconds. The headline states the thing plainly rather than being clever, and one action is offered, not four.
People buy when they feel understood. A block that describes their situation accurately does more work than a paragraph about how long you've been in business.
Scannable blocks, because almost nobody reads top to bottom. Each one has to make sense in isolation, since that's how it will be read.
Cost, timeline, lock-in, whether it'll work for their situation. Handling the objection on the page beats handling it in an email two weeks later.
The same action as the top of the page, offered again at the point where someone has finally decided. Not a choice of three that produces a choice of none.
What a build includes
Scope is agreed page by page before anything starts, so you know exactly what's being built and what isn't.
What pages exist, how they relate, and what each one is for. Decided before any visual work, because rearranging a sitemap later is expensive.
Layouts built for your content rather than your content squeezed into layouts. Key templates designed properly, repeat pages built from a consistent system.
Designed mobile first and checked on real screen sizes, not just scaled down in a browser window until it looks acceptable.
Image weight, font loading, and script count are decided during design, not patched afterwards with a caching plugin and hope.
Heading structure, URL patterns, metadata, and schema built in as the site is made. If you're migrating, redirects are mapped before launch rather than after.
A walkthrough of how to edit the thing, and documentation of anything non-obvious. You shouldn't have to pay us to change a phone number.
How a project runs
The expensive mistakes all happen early, so that's where the time goes. Timelines depend on page count and how quickly content and feedback come back from your side.
Phase 01
Who the site is for, what it needs to do, and which pages exist. Fixed in writing so nothing drifts quietly.
Phase 02
Sitemap, page purpose, and wireframes. Layout decisions get made and approved before any visual design happens.
Phase 03
Key templates designed first and signed off, then the rest built from that system rather than designed one by one.
Phase 04
Built in WordPress so you can maintain it, with speed and heading structure handled as it goes rather than afterwards.
Phase 05
Redirects, tracking, and testing across devices, then handover and a walkthrough of how to edit it.
After launch
A surprising amount of web design is structured so that leaving is painful. We think that's a bad way to keep clients, so here's how it works instead.
Domain, hosting, analytics, and the site itself are registered to you and stay that way. We get access as a user, not as an owner, and it can be revoked whenever you like.
Nothing runs on proprietary software that only we can maintain. Any competent WordPress developer can pick the site up and work on it without an explanation from us.
Text, images, and new pages are yours to change without a support ticket. We'd rather help with the things that need judgement than bill you for a typo fix.
Common questions
It depends on page count, but the honest answer is that the biggest variable is usually on the client side rather than ours. Content and feedback are what projects wait on.
We give a timeline with the scope, along with the dates we need things from you. If those slip, the launch date moves with them rather than the work getting compressed.
Either. Plenty of clients supply their own, and the design accommodates it. If you'd rather not write it, that's content writing and gets scoped alongside the build.
What doesn't work well is designing around placeholder text and hoping real content fits later. It never quite does, so we agree early which way it's going.
Only if the migration is handled carelessly, which is where most redesign traffic losses come from. Redirects get mapped from the old URLs before launch, not retrofitted after someone notices a drop.
If you have rankings worth protecting, say so at the scoping stage and the structural decisions get made with that in mind from the beginning.
Because you can edit it, it's not owned by us, and finding someone else to work on it later is easy. Those three things matter more for most businesses than any technical argument.
If your situation genuinely calls for something else, we'll say so. That's usually a development question rather than a design one, and it lives with web development.
That's what the wireframe and template stages are for. Layout gets approved before visual design, and key templates get approved before the rest of the site is built on them.
Disagreements caught at wireframe stage cost an afternoon. The same disagreement caught after twenty pages are built costs considerably more, which is why the sign-off points exist.
We'll advise on hosting and set it up, but the account stays in your name and you pay the provider directly rather than through us with a margin on top.
Ongoing maintenance can be arranged if you want it, and it's optional. A site that needs constant intervention to keep working was built badly.
If your project is a store or a straightforward WordPress build, those are handled slightly differently. Pricing for all of them sits on the main web design page.
Other web design services
Thirty minutes on your current site, what's not working, and whether a custom build is actually the right spend.
Or email hello@culmen.digital