Web design in Exeter
Exeter is the most demanding audience in Devon, and it has nothing to do with the city being difficult. It is that an Exeter customer has almost certainly seen better websites than yours this week.
The professional firms, the university and the national organisations based here have set a visual standard locally, and a small business site that looks like it was assembled in an afternoon is judged against that standard whether it is fair or not.
- Professional and financial services
- Education and research
- Retail
- Construction and trades
- Tourism gateway
Selling to Exeter
Worth knowing hereA great deal of Exeter business comes from the surrounding countryside, so a site that reads as city-only leaves a large part of its natural market unaddressed.
The comparison you are actually losing to
Most small Exeter businesses assume their competition is the other three firms doing the same trade. It is not. It is the last well-made website that customer used, whoever made it and whatever it sold.
That sets the bar for typography, loading speed and how quickly the page answers the question. None of those things require a large budget. All of them require someone to have made a decision rather than accepted a default.
The good news is that the bar is about craft, not money. A plain, fast, well-set page with real photographs beats an expensive template with stock imagery, and it does so consistently.
Serving a catchment far bigger than the city
Exeter trades on a rural catchment stretching well past the city boundary, and the M5 ending here is part of why. A business in Exeter is often selling to Cullompton, Crediton, Tiverton, Okehampton and the villages between them.
That has a direct consequence for the site: the places you serve need saying out loud. A customer in Crediton deciding between two Exeter firms will reasonably favour the one whose site suggests they come out that way.
It also means travel and coverage questions belong on the page rather than in a phone call. “Do you come to me?” is the most common unasked question a service business faces here.
Marsh Barton and the trade counter problem
A great many Exeter businesses sit on the trading estates — Marsh Barton in particular is large enough to be its own district, and it is easy to be lost in.
If customers come to you, the site has to solve arriving, not just finding. Which entrance, what the unit looks like, where to park and what the opening hours really are on a Saturday. These sound trivial and they are the difference between a visit and a phone call that never happens.
Questions people here ask
- Is £249 realistic for a professional firm in Exeter?
- For a well-made site that states what you do, proves it and makes contact easy, yes. What it does not include is a bespoke design system or bespoke photography, and in a city like this the photography is usually the thing worth spending on next.
- Will my site look as good as a big agency's?
- On the things that decide it — speed, clarity, typography, working properly on a phone — it should be as good or better, because those are engineering decisions rather than budget ones. On bespoke illustration or motion work, no, and I would rather say so than pretend.
- Do I need to list every village I cover?
- No, and a list of forty parish names reads as spam. Name the places you genuinely work in regularly and say where your limit is. That is more persuasive than a long list and it is true.
Sites we have built
Live, working businesses. Visit them and judge the standard yourself.
Also across the South West
Tell me about your business.
One message is enough to start. I’ll read it and reply myself, usually with a couple of questions and a clear price.
Liam Tapp, Website Builds