Web Design ExeterWeb Design Exeter

The work, and who it is for in Exeter

The honest advice for an Exeter business is the opposite of what a web designer would normally say. Do not spend a year chasing the city name. Build for the searches your actual customers run, which are service-plus-place phrases and the map pack, and if you serve the wider county then build pages for the places where the terms are still open. There is a Torquay page on this site showing exactly how different those numbers are twenty miles down the road.

It tells you an Exeter client is worth real money, and it tells you the paid route into this market is expensive. Between a difficulty-49 organic term and a £26.55 click, the sensible third option — the Google Business Profile, reviews, and the long tail — is the one almost nobody prioritises.

Exeter’s economy is professional and financial services, the university, a large health and public sector including the hospital and the Met Office, tourism and hospitality, and the agricultural and food economy of the county behind it. The nearest comparable work is Pro Pave, a paving company rebuilt as 27 pages so every service and area had somewhere of its own to rank — which is the structure that lets a Devon business pick up the open towns instead of fighting for the closed city.

Worth saying plainly rather than hoping you do not ask: I am in Manchester, not Exeter. There is no local office and this page does not pretend there is one. Two builds in Northern Ireland and one in the Republic of Ireland have run entirely remotely without difficulty, and what you should insist on from any remote supplier is the same list I would insist on — the domain registered in your name, the hosting in your own account, a full working copy of the site if you ever leave, and no exit fee. All four are standard here and they are written down on the pricing page.

And before any website work at all: the Google Business Profile. It is free, it takes an afternoon, and for a local business it decides the map pack that sits above every result a website can win. That is an awkward thing to put on a web designer’s page and it is still the right first move.

What you get, and what it costs

The same three numbers as everybody else, published rather than quoted on request: from £500 for the build, from £50 a month for hosting and care, and growth blocks from £250 a month if and when the site should start earning more. No setup fee, no management fee, no percentage of ad spend, and no minimum term on anything.

• A bespoke build rather than a page-builder assembly, so the site is fast on a phone rather than fast on your laptop.
• A page for each service and each area you actually sell in, so every search has somewhere of its own to land instead of competing with the homepage.
• Editable by you, with a walkthrough at handover.
• The domain in your name and the hosting in your account, with a full working copy if you ever leave.
• Titles, structure and metadata written around the searches your customers actually run — not around a keyword dump.