A thoughtful, independent approach to building better business websites.

Better Business Websites is an independent web design and development practice focused on helping established businesses make more of the websites they already have.

The work sits somewhere between web design, development, content, technical problem-solving and business consultancy. The starting point is rarely simply “what should this page look like?” It’s more often: what does the business need the website to do, what’s getting in the way, and what would make it more useful to the people on both sides of it?

The perspective behind the work

That approach comes from more than two decades of professional experience spanning technical production, business operations, client delivery, communication and hands-on website work. It brings the perspective of someone who’s had to use websites as business tools, not simply design them for other people.

That matters because established businesses often reach a point where their website no longer quite reflects the business behind it. Years of separate decisions about content, design, technology and marketing can gradually pull in different directions. The business may have grown, changed or become more sophisticated while the website has accumulated rather than evolved.

Bringing the decisions together

Better Business Websites brings those decisions back together. Business understanding, writing, visual design and technical implementation are considered as parts of the same problem, with the context carried through from the first conversation to the finished website.

The practice is deliberately independent and hands-on. Clients work directly with the person doing the thinking and the work, rather than passing through layers of account management or separate departments. That creates a clear line of responsibility and helps preserve the reasoning behind decisions as a project moves from understanding the business into structure, words, design and implementation.

Improving the right things

Many established businesses do not need a fashionable new website for the sake of having one. They need somebody to understand what they do, work out what is and is not helping, and improve the right things.

Sometimes that means restructuring content or redesigning an interface. Sometimes it means improving performance, search visibility or accessibility. Sometimes it means building something bespoke because an off-the-shelf website can’t quite do what the business needs.

The aim’s the same in each case: to make the website a better representation of the business behind it, a clearer experience for the people using it, and a more useful part of how the business works.