# Website Design & Build in Edinburgh

> Fast, modern websites for small and medium businesses in Scotland, from £1,200 for five pages and live in 2 to 3 weeks. Built by hand or on WordPress, with SEO, GEO, structured data and Google Business Profile setup included rather than sold separately. You own the code and the domain.

Canonical page: https://daveellis.dev/websites/
Made by Dave Ellis (Edinburgh, Scotland). Email: dave@daveellis.dev
Last updated: 2026-11-12

Website design and build: what is included, what pushes the price up, the four-step process, and the proof.

## Website design and build, in Edinburgh.

A fast, modern site for a small or medium business, written around what your customers actually search for and built so Google and the AI assistants can both read it. Five pages from £1,200, live in two to three weeks, and you own every part of it when it is done.

## What you are actually buying

Most small business websites fail in one of two ways. Either they look fine and nobody ever finds them, or they were cheap, they load in six seconds and the phone number is an image. Both are expensive, just not on the invoice.

What I build is a site that answers the questions a customer has before they phone you, loads in under a second on a phone on a bad signal, and carries the technical groundwork that makes it findable. That groundwork is not a package tier here. It is how the site is built, so it costs nothing extra.

Five pages is the starting point because five is usually what a business needs: who you are, what you do, proof that you can do it, how much, and how to reach you. A trade with twelve distinct services needs twelve pages, and each one of those earns its keep in search rather than padding a sitemap.

## Included at the published price

- Design and build, mobile first. Designed on a phone screen and then widened, because that is the order your customers will see it in.
- Copy shaped around real searches. You do not have to arrive with the words written. I shape them from a conversation about what you do and what people ask you.
- Technical SEO throughout. Semantic HTML, clean headings, fast Core Web Vitals, JSON-LD structured data, a sitemap and a robots.txt that behaves.
- GEO, so AI assistants can quote you. An llms.txt, consistent facts across every page and markup a model can read without guessing.
- Google Business Profile set up. The single highest-return hour of work for most local businesses, and the one most often left half finished.
- Accessibility taken seriously. Real contrast, keyboard navigation, alt text that says something, and headings in an order a screen reader can follow.
- You own all of it. The code, the domain, the content. No licence, no platform you can only leave by starting again.

## £1,200 for five pages, and then it depends.

That is a real starting number, not a loss leader with the useful parts removed. Here is exactly what moves it, so you can work out roughly where you land before you email me.

£1,200 +

From · 5 pages · live in 2 to 3 weeks

Design, build, copy shaping, structured data, search and AI groundwork, and Google Business Profile setup. Care and hosting afterwards is £45 a month, with no contract.

- Five pages, mobile first
- Copy shaped around what people search
- Schema, sitemap and llms.txt
- Google Business Profile set up
- Loads in under a second
- You own the code and the domain

Live in 2 to 3 weeks

### What pushes the price up

- More pages. Five is the starting point. A trade with twelve services needs twelve pages, and each one earns its keep in search.
- Taking payments or bookings. Anything that touches money needs testing properly, which takes time.
- An AI integration on a website. An assistant that genuinely knows your business is a build of its own. It is included in every business system; on a website it is priced separately.
- Moving off an old platform. Rescuing content from a site nobody has the login for takes longer than starting clean.
- Photography you do not have. Stock images of other people's workshops do not sell your workshop. If there are no photographs, that is a real gap to plan for.

### What never costs extra

- The SEO and GEO work. It is not an upsell. A site that cannot be found is not finished.
- Being fast. Performance is how I build, not a package tier.
- Owning your own work. The code, the domain and the content are yours. No lock-in, no licence, no ransom.
- Asking me a question. There is no clock running on an email.

## From first email to live.

- What it has to do A conversation about the business, not about websites. Who your customers are, what they ask before they buy, what you want more of and what you would rather stop doing.
- Structure and words The page list, the headings and the copy, shaped around real searches. This is the part that decides whether the site works, and it happens before anything is designed.
- Design and build Designed on a phone screen first and built as it is designed, so there is no handover gap where the detail goes missing. You see it on a real URL as it comes together.
- Live and findable Launch, redirects from any old URLs, structured data checked, sitemap submitted, Google Business Profile set up, and llms.txt in place for the AI crawlers.

### Charnwood Coatings & Fabrication

A UKCA-marked structural steel fabricator established in 1985, whose customers check them out online before picking up the phone. A fast, content-rich site built to show real capability and turn enquiries into work.

### The Circle

An award-winning community interest company carrying four offers at once: affordable workspaces, consultancy, mobility and volunteering. Rebuilt and rethemed on WordPress, with a colour-coded system for the four strands and an accessible palette throughout.

### What does a website cost?

A five page website starts at £1,200, including the design, the build, the copy shaping, the structured data and the Google Business Profile setup. More pages, online payments, bookings or a migration from an old platform push it up. Care and hosting afterwards is £45 a month with no contract.

### How long does a website take?

Two to three weeks for a five page site, from the point the content exists. The build is rarely what sets the pace: it is usually the copy, the photographs and the one person who has to approve things. If you have that material ready, or you are happy for me to shape the copy from a conversation, three weeks is realistic. If a page needs twelve services written from scratch, it takes longer, and I will say so before we start rather than halfway through.

### Can you move my site off Wix, Squarespace or WordPress?

Yes, and it is a common reason people get in touch. Rescuing content from a platform nobody has the login for takes longer than starting clean, so a migration pushes the price up rather than down. The important part is what happens to your search rankings: existing URLs are either kept exactly as they are or redirected properly to their new homes, so the pages Google already knows about do not quietly turn into dead ends on launch day.

### Do you work with WordPress, or only hand-built sites?

Both, and which one you need depends on who is going to edit the site. Hand-built is faster, cheaper to run and has nothing to keep patching, which suits most five to fifteen page business sites. WordPress makes sense when a team needs to publish without asking anyone, or when the site is already there and the real job is design and structure rather than starting again. The Circle is the second kind: rebuilt and rethemed on WordPress because the organisation publishes constantly.

Every question, answered