Liam Tapp, and why a build from me is £249.99

The costs I never have to get back

If you want real market figures — what agencies, freelancers and the DIY platforms actually charge in 2026 — my guide to what a website costs in the UK sets them out with sources. Better there than waved around on my own about page.

What belongs here is the part that is specific to me. I work from home, which takes premises, payroll and sales commission out of the sum in one go. I do the design and the build myself, so a project manager would have nobody to coordinate, and the fortnight of discovery workshops that an agency has to bill for never happens. Strip all of that out of a brochure site and you are most of the way to £249.99 already.

The frame gets reused. The writing never does.

The second reason is that I do not start from a blank page. The shape of a good trade site has been settled for years: what you do, how far you will travel, evidence you have done it before, and one obvious way to get hold of you. I keep the layouts, the navigation and the enquiry flows that already work on live sites and use them again, which takes days out of a build.

What gets written fresh every time is the words, and the thinking about your business. Nobody visiting your site can see a grid system or a reused component, and nobody would care if they could. They can absolutely tell when a sentence could have belonged to any other firm in the same trade. Being strict about which half repeats and which half is written from scratch is how the price holds without the site getting thinner.

The seven sites I look after

The seven are TR Trees, Recycled Kitchens Cornwall, CB Flooring, CBM Decorators, MK Repairs, Coast & Quay Property Care and LCD Haulage. TR Trees has a tool that shows a homeowner roughly what would come off the tree before they agree to anything. CB Flooring carries a 222-floor catalogue and a calculator that works out packs per square metre, with a Redruth showroom on the way.

CBM Decorators runs a colour visualiser and a large gallery, because decorating is bought on finished photographs. MK Repairs in Wadebridge collects a photograph with the enquiry, so a quote is not guesswork over the phone. Coast & Quay Property Care is built around changeover day, for owners whose holiday let is nowhere near where they live. LCD Haulage covers Cornwall and Devon with a page written for every one of forty towns, because whether a crane lorry can physically reach a job is the thing customers ring to ask. Seven clients, seven sites in daily use. Open a couple of them on your phone, then look at the price again.

Where being one person will let you down

I trade as one person and will not dress it up as something bigger. If I am ill or away, nobody covers for me. I take a small number of builds at once deliberately, so when the queue is full you get a start date instead of a bad start. There is no copywriter or photographer on hand either, so if your text needs writing properly or your logo needs drawing, I will send you to someone who does that for a living rather than charge you for a weak attempt.

If your business needs a supplier with a ticketed support desk, an uptime guarantee in writing and a procurement process to sign it all off, I am the wrong choice, and you should pay a firm built for that. What you get here instead is direct dealing with the person who actually made the thing, at a price that reflects there being nobody else to pay.

Things worth asking

Do you pass any of the work to anybody else?

No. The design, the build, the deployment and the support afterwards are all me. Where I am not the right person — writing your copy, drawing a logo — I refer the work out openly rather than quietly subcontracting it and adding a margin on top.

How many clients are you carrying, and does support get slower as you take on more?

Seven live sites at the time of writing. Support only slows down if I let the client count run ahead of the hours, which is why builds are capped rather than sold as fast as they come in. When I do have to choose, a broken live site comes before a new build every time.

What if two of us have a problem on the same morning?

Anything genuinely down or losing enquiries gets dealt with first, and whoever is second gets told where they are rather than left guessing. Hosting, backups and security patching carry on without me, so a real outage is much rarer than a change request waiting an extra few hours.

I already have a website. Will you tell me if I don't need a new one?

Yes, and it has happened. Sometimes the site is fine and the actual problem is that nobody can find the phone number on a mobile, or the domain is weeks from lapsing. I would rather say so and keep your goodwill than take the money for work that changes nothing.