Web design for Falmouth businesses

A town full of people trained to look closely

In most towns a slightly clumsy website costs you nothing, because nobody looks hard enough to mind. In Falmouth much of your enquiry traffic has spent three years being taught to look hard. Stretched logos, four typefaces arguing on one page: they register here in a way they do not in a town without an art school in it.

That cuts in your favour more than against it. A restrained, honestly photographed site earns more credit here than the same site would earn somewhere less design-literate, and it does not have to be clever to manage that. Photographs of your own work, one typeface used properly, prices wherever you can give them. cbmdecoratorscornwall.co.uk works that way: a decorator's own finished rooms, and very little else getting in the way of them.

What happens in September

Every summer the town lets out a fresh cohort of designers and illustrators, some through the university's Launchpad incubator, most straight into freelancing. Some will quote you less than I will, and plenty are better at visual craft than I am. Pretending otherwise would insult people you have already met, because they work behind the counter in half the places on the high street.

The risk has less to do with the quality of the work than with what happens the following autumn. The site went up on a hosting account opened with a university email address, the domain was registered in the builder's own name because that was quicker at the time, and then a studio job comes up in Bristol. Everything keeps working, which is the deceptive part. The trouble starts the first time you need a phone number changed, a certificate swapped or a security patch applied, and the only person with the login has a new employer and no particular reason to reply.

Whoever you end up hiring, make sure the handover includes the logins, not just the finished pages without going through anybody. That one arrangement is worth more to you than the gap between any two quotes. It is also why I charge a monthly fee rather than taking a single lump and moving on: the fee only earns anything if I am still answering in year three.

Getting onto a schedule that cannot slip

If you supply Pendennis, A&P or one of the smaller marine engineering firms around the dock estate, your website does a different job. A buyer or a subcontract manager opens it once your name has come up, to work out whether you are safe to put on a programme with a fixed dry-dock window. A refit is sequenced around a vessel's availability months ahead, and a supplier who turns out to be uninsured or two people short at that stage delays an undocking, with a number attached to it.

So the questions being asked of your site are narrow and exact. Are the insurance figures current, and dated. Which accreditations, and when do they lapse. What size of job have you genuinely done, and on what sort of vessel. How many people can you put on site inside a fortnight, and will you work nights when the dock window demands it. Who answers the phone at seven on a Sunday.

Write it so it survives being forwarded

Put all of that one click from the homepage, in language that holds up when the page is printed and dropped into a supplier pack. The same holds for the Celtic Sea work behind the laydown plans. The people qualifying that supply chain will read dozens of capability pages, and they will remember the one that answered the question rather than describing a passion for quality.

The academic year is the other season

Falmouth does not shut in October the way the north coast does, because term time carries trade through the winter. The two calendars still want different things from you. The Sea Shanty Festival in June, Falmouth Week in August and the Oyster Festival in October bring people who are here for a few days and want to know whether you are open and whether you are already full. Term-time trade searches by name, comes back, and compares before it commits. A site built for one calendar reads as indifferent to the other, and in a town this small that is noticed.