Websites built to be found
A website has two jobs. It has to say what you do in a way a stranger understands, and it has to turn up when that stranger searches. Most of the sites I’m asked to look at do neither, and it’s rarely because they’re ugly. It’s because the people who built them were designers, or developers, or SEO people, and nobody was all three at once.
I build sites from the position outwards. What’s the business actually for, who’s it for, what should they do when they get there. Then the structure, then the pages, then the technical work that gets it found, and then the measurement so we know whether any of it worked. That’s one job, and I do the whole of it.
What you get
A site that’s fast, because I build them as static pages on Cloudflare rather than on a content management system with fifty plugins fighting each other. The site you’re reading now is built that way, and so is the 690 page regulated site I moved off WordPress in August 2026.
A site that’s found. The technical structure, the page titles and descriptions, the markup search engines read, and the internal links all get done as part of the build rather than fixed afterwards. The site I built for a Bristol trade laminator in 2018 went to number one on Google for “print encapsulation” and it’s still there, which I checked on 8 September 2026, eight years on.
A site that doesn’t lose what you already had. If you’ve got an existing site with a history, every old address gets mapped to a new one, and nothing goes to a dead page. On the Claims Bible migration that meant a redirect file of 344 lines and a separate list of 98 addresses that were deliberately gone, and it meant refusing a shortcut. A matching tool offered me seven confident redirects that were wrong, pointing one lender’s page at a different lender, and on a regulated site a wrong page served correctly is worse than a missing one, so I threw them out and did it by hand.
A site that checks itself. Before anything I build goes live, an audit runs over every page and refuses to deploy if a title’s too long, a link’s broken, an image has no description or a page is over its speed budget. That’s not because I don’t trust myself, it’s because at 690 pages nobody should.
A site you can measure. Analytics with consent handled properly, key events on the things that matter, and Search Console set up before launch rather than after, so there’s a baseline to compare against.
What it costs to get it wrong
The Claims Bible site is the clearest example I’ve got, because I can show the whole thing. It was a WordPress site of about 1,320 files with years of address debt, under an FCA authorisation, and I rebuilt it as a custom static build that generates between 670 and 690 pages. In the week after it cut over on 19 August 2026, search clicks went from 484 to 611, up 26%, and on the set of keywords I track it went past MoneySavingExpert. The case study has the chart and the week after that, which fell back, because I’d rather you saw the whole line. The whole site was signed off by the external compliance consultant the day it relaunched.
The Express Encapsulation site is the other one, and it’s the better story for an owner-managed business, because the rebuild in 2018 was the start of five years of work rather than the end of it. The shop I built them to sell laminating film was repurposed in April 2020 to sell PPE, and that May was the biggest month in five years of their accounts, at £167,561, in the month the rest of the print trade was on furlough.
How I work
I build the site with AI writing the code alongside me. I specify it, decide what goes in and what stays out, test it and own the result. I say that plainly because you’d ask, and because it’s why one person can now build what used to take a team. The judgement about what to build is still the job.
I host what I build, on infrastructure I run, and I’d rather do that than hand the site to a shared server somebody else looks after, because the speed and the structure I’ve just described depend on the site staying where it was built to run. So hosting and looking after the site is part of the offer, and it comes with a list of what I actually do each month rather than a fee for being on standby. If you’d rather host it yourself, that’s fine, and I’ll tell you what you’ll need to keep it as fast as it was on the day it launched.
The proof
The two case studies are the Claims Bible rebuild and Express Encapsulation.
“Gavin built our website from scratch and honestly, it just worked. He kept things simple, the design looks great, and it does exactly what we need. He had loads of great ideas and took care of everything without increasing my workload sourcing bits and pieces. When we’ve had the odd tweak since launch he’s sorted it quickly and with zero fuss.”
Dan Bond at CrossFit Fort-Ashtonwhose site I built from scratch
“Gavin managed our website rebuild, SEO, and IT systems, which made a real difference. He communicated clearly, delivered on his promises, and dealt with any issues quickly and professionally.”
Chloë McGuire at Express Encapsulation and Laminationin 2026
Who this is for
Established businesses whose site was built a while ago by someone who’s moved on, and who’ve been told they need a new one without anyone explaining what the current one’s doing wrong. And anyone with a site that has a history worth keeping, where the move itself is the risky bit.
If that’s you, tell me what the site’s meant to do and what it’s doing instead, and I’ll have a look at it before we talk.
Tell me what’s not working.
I’ll tell you whether I can help and roughly what it would involve.