A week, roughly
| Share of the week | Doing | Why it is design |
|---|---|---|
| A quarter | Understanding the business: what it sells, to whom, what customers ask, what the current site fails to answer | Every later decision depends on it |
| A quarter | Structure and words: which pages exist, what each answers, in the customer’s vocabulary, in what order | This is what people see; the visuals are its clothing |
| A fifth | Visual design and build: layout, type, colour, imagery, the code that makes it fast and stable | The part people think is the whole job |
| A tenth | Making it findable: titles, structure, speed, schema, the Google Business Profile | A site that cannot be found has no users to design for |
| A tenth | Measuring: Search Console, load times, conversion, what changed after launch | Design without measurement is decoration |
| The rest | Client conversations, hosting, fixes, the thing that broke on Sunday | Websites are alive; someone has to look after them |
Source: Cybrial’s own working pattern, September 2026. Agencies split these across roles; a small studio does them in sequence.
Designer, developer, agency: who does what
- A web designer decides what the site says, how it is structured, how it looks and behaves. Traditionally hands the design over to be built.
- A web developer writes the code that makes it work: the front end people see, the back end that stores products and takes orders, the performance.
- In a small studio, one person does both, which removes the hand-over where most things get lost, and means the person who chose where the price goes is the person who can move it.
- An agency employs designers, developers, project managers, account managers and often marketers, each doing their part, coordinated by the two managers. Necessary at scale; a management layer at small scale.
What you are paying for at £500 and at £5,000
On the live Manchester web design result, one studio in ten shows a price, so most people never learn what the money buys. Ours start at £500 and that buys the decisions in the table above applied to a focused site: structure, words in the customer’s language, a fast build, findability basics, measurement set up, and the site handed over owned outright. It is deliberately low because we make our money on the growth work afterwards, not on the build.
At £5,000 and beyond you are buying more of the first two rows (research, several rounds of structure and copy), custom illustration or photography, more pages, integrations, and, at agencies, the management layer. Whether the extra pays back depends on whether the business needs it. A five-page trade site does not; a platform with list-building and gifting journeys, like the gift-list service we built, does.
Is web design still in demand, with AI builders?
Yes, and the job has moved. AI builders and templates produce a plausible-looking page in minutes, and that has made the visual layer cheap. What they do not do is know your customers, your prices, your area, what goes wrong on your jobs, what people type into Google, or why the enquiry form should have three fields not nine. The decisions in the first two rows of the table are the job now, and the third row is the part being automated.
The evidence is in the results themselves. The pages holding page one for Manchester web design searches are not the prettiest; they are the ones with a price in the title, a named person, reviews, and pages that answer what people type. A designer who does that work is in more demand than one who only does the visuals, and the visuals were never the hard part.
What to expect from a good one
- Questions about your customers before any talk of colours.
- A structure and the words before a mock-up.
- A price published or given plainly, and a list of what happens after launch.
- A site you own: domain, hosting, code and content in your name.
- Measured results they can show, with the source and the date.
- At least one thing you did not want to hear.
