Web design in Newquay
Cornwall Council's Experience Newquay work puts 67 per cent of the town's visitors in the months from April to September, and every one of them arrives holding a phone that wants the same masts yours does. A page that appears in a second and a half on office broadband in March can take fifteen seconds on a handset in the Towan car park on an August Saturday. Nobody standing in that car park diagnoses a network; they decide your website is broken and open the next one. So this page is mostly about weight: how much a page has to drag down the wire before a customer can read your opening hours.
This page is text and CSS. No hero video, no map embed, no review carousel, no chat bubble. The bars below are drawn with two divs.
- 67%
- of the town's visitors arrive April to September, per Cornwall Council's Experience Newquay work
- <400KB
- what I aim for on the first screen of a Newquay site
- 5–9 Aug
- Boardmasters 2026, when a year of traffic arrives in one swallow
- 13
- space companies in the Space Systems Operations Facility beside the runway
- 800+
- homes occupied at Nansledan, with more than 40 businesses trading
Office broadband, March
1.5s
A handset in the Towan car park, August Saturday
15s
June to September, the masts are full
From June the resident population is joined by a very large number of people who all brought a phone. Same masts, same holiday-park wifi, same crowded car parks at Fistral, Towan and Watergate. The handset says 4G and behaves like something much older.
Weight is the part of that you control, and it is settled at build time: how many separate files the page asks for, how large the photographs are, and how many other companies' scripts run before your opening hours appear.
Boardmasters, 5 to 9 August 2026
The music sits at Trebelsue Farm above Watergate Bay and the free surf festival runs on Fistral, where the Boardmasters Open carries a YETI Pro QS 4,000 rating. For five days the town takes a year of traffic in one swallow, on a network that was already at its limit in July.
Which is useful, because you have the date in the diary. Test in June: stand on the beach, clear the cache, open your own site on your own phone on the real connection, and count. Unpleasant in June is unusable on 8 August.
What I take out first
The autoplaying hero video. Several megabytes arriving before a single word of text does, and muted anyway. Then the embedded map, swapped for a written address, a what3words reference if you are somewhere awkward, and a link that opens the visitor's own maps app. Live social feeds, review carousels and chat bubbles each fetch someone else's code, and every one of them can wait until a person has read what you do.
In their place: photographs resized before they reach the site rather than eight megabytes straight off a camera, pages served as static files from an edge network, and prices, times and the phone number written as text near the top where they are readable while the images are still coming in. Then one editable block for whatever goes stale. Cornwall Council ended support for the Gatwick route in February 2026, Skybus stopped flying it on 31 May, and easyJet picked it up twice weekly from 23 June. Hardcode that into fifteen accommodation pages and you are wrong within a season.
The deposit button
A surf school, a board hire counter, a sea safari, a flat on Pentire and a cafe above Tolcarne are all selling one thing: a slot. The customer is stood in a car park choosing between you and somebody four hundred metres away. A form promising a reply within 48 hours loses to a page saying tomorrow's ten o'clock has three spaces and taking twenty pounds to hold one.
Deposits also handle the August problem nobody enjoys discussing, which is people not turning up on a day you could have sold three times over. Taking money is quoted on top of a brochure build, because a payment integration is real work and testing it properly matters more than what it costs.
Selling aerospace work under an NDA
The units around Aerohub have a website problem the surf schools do not. Cornwall Airport Newquay holds the UK's first spaceport licence, granted for horizontal launch, and thirteen space companies work out of the Space Systems Operations Facility beside the runway. If you machine parts, lay up composites, build ground-station hardware or fly drones over the 650 acres shared with RAF St Mawgan, your difficulty is the venue rather than the pitch. A public page is legible to everybody on earth, while much of what would convince a buyer is technical data you are not permitted to publish, or a customer you have signed an NDA about.
So the site has to demonstrate capability without exhibiting the evidence. Describe processes, tolerances, materials, standards held and the machines you own rather than the parts you made. Photograph equipment rather than jobs in progress, and check the backgrounds for a drawing on the wall or a part number on a crate. Keep the detailed capability statement as something you send after a conversation, not a PDF sitting at a public address that indexes itself. Then say who to ring and how fast you answer.
The Newquay that still trades in February
Bank Street lost its Poundland in August 2025 and vacancies along East Street and Cliff Road are a running local complaint. At the other end of town the Duchy of Cornwall's Nansledan keeps filling in: over 800 homes occupied, more than 40 businesses trading, and Market Street going up as a 75,000 sq ft commercial centre anchored by a Tesco. Those are permanent residents, and in February they search for an electrician, a nursery or somebody to look at the washing machine.
MK Repairs at mk-repairs.co.uk is that market's kind of site, and one I built and look after. Appliance repairs: a person is standing over a machine full of water, and the whole job of the site is to get them to a phone number without asking them to read anything first. If you trade here all year rather than for twenty weeks, that is nearer what you want than anything with a sunset on it. Tell me what you sell and when you sell it, and I will tell you what I would build.
Named client, Newquay
MK Repairs — mk-repairs.co.uk
Built and looked after by me, and still the site I would point a year-round Newquay trade at.
Asked before the season starts
- Can the site take a deposit for a slot, or only enquiries?
- Either, and for a booking business the deposit is usually the point. It sits outside a brochure build because it means connecting a payment provider and testing the awkward parts: refunds, cancellations, and what happens when the surf is flat. Tell me whether you sell hours, seats or nights and I will cost it.
- How do you know it is quick on a real phone here rather than on your laptop?
- Because I throttle the connection and test on a handset, and because the page is small enough that the test rarely turns up anything alarming. I aim to have the first screen of a Newquay site under about 400KB, which is roughly a tenth of what one unresized camera photograph weighs.
- Our biggest customer will not let us name them. How do we show the work?
- You describe the work and not the customer: the sector, the process, the tolerance, the standard, the volume. Buyers in that chain read it correctly, because they operate under the same restrictions. Anything that cannot be public goes in a document you send once you have spoken to someone.
- Should I embed my booking system's calendar on the home page?
- Usually not on the page people land on. Those widgets load a lot of somebody else's code before anything of yours appears, which is the exact failure this town punishes in August. Put a button through to the booking page instead. Your home page stays light and the booking system still gets the booking.
- We are booked solid in August. What should the site say then?
- What is actually left. A page pretending nothing has changed collects enquiries you cannot answer and loses the person twice. Show the next free dates, offer a cancellation list, and keep next season visible. Being straight about being full is how you get next year's booking instead of an angry voicemail.