Web Design in Richmond

A lot of Richmond’s business is done on recommendation. Wealth managers, financial advisers, solicitors, accountants, property firms and consultancies, many of them small teams with large clients, win most of their work because somebody passed their name on. The next thing that person does is look you up.

So the website has a specific job here. For someone who already has your name, it has to confirm the recommendation within a minute: who you are, who you work for, what it costs to talk to you. For someone who doesn’t, it has to turn up when they search for web design in Richmond, a financial adviser in Kew or a solicitor in East Sheen, and give them a reason to stay.

The same holds for the rest of the borough’s economy: the restaurants and hotels that live off visitors to the riverside, Richmond Park and Kew Gardens, the independent schools, the charities and the shops on George Street and Hill Rise. Each needs a site built around how its customers actually decide.

• Back up the referral. Team pages, credentials and real examples of your work, written for the person who was told to call you and wants to check first.
• Handle regulated content properly. Financial services is where much of our work sits, including sites for SurePay, the payment verification service that is part of Rabobank. Disclosures, policies and risk wording go where regulators and readers expect them.
• Work on a phone. Most local searches happen on a mobile. Every page we build is measured against Core Web Vitals before launch.
• Sell, if you sell. For Richmond’s independent retailers we build online shops on WooCommerce or Shopify, connected to the stock and payment systems you already use.

There is no shortage of Richmond web design firms, from freelancers to large London agencies. A few questions sort them quickly.

• Who does the work? Ask whether the designers and developers are employed by the agency or brought in per project. Ours are in-house.
• Can you see live sites? Screenshots hide slow pages. Open a few of their recent sites on your own phone.
• What happens to your rankings? A redesign that drops your old addresses without redirects can lose years of search visibility. Ask how they handle it.
• Who looks after it after launch? Hosting, updates and fixes need an owner. Find out whether it’s the agency, a third party or you.
• Is the quote fixed? A fixed, itemised quote tells you what you’re buying. An hourly estimate tells you much less.

Website builders have their place. For a new sole trader testing an idea, one can be a sensible start. Once the site has to rank in a competitive area, feed a CRM or carry regulated content, most businesses outgrow it, and that is usually when they come to an agency.

When a site needs more than pages, such as client logins, bookings or connections to your CRM, you need a web development company in Richmond as well as a designer. Our own developers handle that work, so Richmond web development and design stay with one team.

Plenty of people searching for a web design company in Richmond also want to know who can help them be found, and the two are closely linked. A site with a sensible structure, fast pages and clean headings gives search engine optimisation something to work with. A slow site with one page for everything makes it an uphill job.

Say you run a small accountancy practice in East Sheen. Local search for you comes down to a well-kept Google Business Profile, a page for each service you want to be found for, reviews from real clients, and a site that loads quickly enough that people don’t leave before reading it. We build those foundations into every site. For ongoing work on rankings, content and links, see our SEO services.

If you’re comparing an SEO company in Richmond upon Thames with a web designer, you don’t have to choose: we do both, and the site is built with search in mind from the first workshop.

This page is for businesses in Richmond town centre, Kew, Barnes, Mortlake, East Sheen, Ham, Petersham and St Margarets, and across the old Richmond, Surrey postal area. Our office is in Twickenham, so a workshop at your premises or ours is easy to arrange. See also our pages for Twickenham, Teddington and Kingston, or our London web design services.

Website design for Richmond, Surrey, as many people still call it, and for the rest of south west London, follows the same process, with meetings in person or over video.