Between two universities, a creative quarter and a long list of one-person studios, finding someone in Nottingham to make a site look right is the easy part. The harder part, and the part we are hired for, is a site that stays quick on a phone, that your staff can edit on an ordinary afternoon, and that Google and the AI assistants can read without running a line of JavaScript.
Thanks, that’s with us.
A senior engineer reads every enquiry and will reply as soon as they can.
Book a time that suits you, or send a message on WhatsApp.
2020
Building since
1,000+
Clients served
UK
Registered company
4.6/5
Rated on Clutch
Quick answer
Ask a Nottingham business owner what is wrong with their website and the answer is rarely the colours. It is that the page takes an age to appear on a phone, that changing the opening hours means emailing whoever built it, that the contact form has a dozen boxes, and that neither Google nor ChatGPT has much to say about what the firm actually does. A fresh coat of paint over those faults leaves every one of them in place.
Our starting point is the plumbing rather than the paintwork. Which pages bring in enquiries now? What must a first-time visitor see before they scroll? Which content system will your staff genuinely keep up to date? Which old addresses have to point somewhere sensible so the search traffic you already have carries over? Once those answers are settled, the look of the site has something solid to sit on.
Buying web design in Nottingham means choosing from a long list. The University of Nottingham and Nottingham Trent University between them produce a steady stream of design and computing graduates, so freelancers and small studios are everywhere, and the converted warehouses of the Lace Market and the side streets of Hockley have housed creative and digital firms for years. The range is good news for buyers, with one catch: two quotes for “a new website” can describe completely different jobs, one a bought theme with your logo dropped in and the other a bespoke build. Put the written scopes side by side, not the totals.
Before going further, the honest bit: we do not have a Nottingham office, studio or desk. SpiderHunts Technologies Ltd keeps its registered office in London, the people who do the work are a remote team, and a Nottingham project runs on video calls, shared documents and a single named contact. If meeting your designer in person matters to you, choose a studio in the city instead; we would sooner lose the project than mislead you about it.
Services
Eight strands of work. A typical project pulls in two or three of them: a new site, the move from the old one, and someone to look after it afterwards.
For service firms, clinics, practices and B2B suppliers, starting from the pages that win enquiries now. Laid out for small screens first, rendered on the server so crawlers get the full text, and built from templates your staff can reuse for new pages.
Fresh WordPress builds on a light theme, and repair work on sites you inherited: a plugin list nobody can explain, a page builder dragging every page down, updates everyone is scared to press. A sensible platform when staff post news, vacancies or case studies often.
Shopify, WooCommerce or custom-built shops, with categories, product data and checkout worked out before any template is designed. For independents starting to sell online and for brands leaving a platform that no longer copes.
Moving to a new site, on the same domain or a new one, with each address that earns visits pointed at its replacement. Redirects are tried on a test copy first and inspected again after go-live, because this is where redesigns quietly lose their search traffic.
Plain statements of what you do, where and for whom, with matching facts on your site and your profiles, so ChatGPT, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews have something accurate to draw on when a buyer asks them for a recommendation.
Area pages, structured data and a Google Business Profile that tell the same story, set up during the build instead of bolted on later. Ongoing SEO after launch is a separate retainer, from £1,500 a month.
The site kept running once it is live: hosting, security and software updates, backups, speed checks, a set number of small changes each month and a basic SEO health check. From £150 a month and entirely optional; we can also adopt a site someone else built after checking its condition.
Where part of the website is really an application: customer logins, booking and scheduling, quote calculators or a trade ordering portal. Quoted as its own piece of work, so you can see what the marketing pages and the software each cost.
Costs
Our business websites start from £3,000 plus VAT, and the care plan, if you want it, from £150 a month plus VAT. Treat those as the entry point for a simple site, not a typical bill. Before you commit to anything you receive a written quote with scope agreed up front.
Your postcode has no bearing on the figure. The size of the design job does, as do the volume of copy to write or carry over and the systems the site must talk to. Use the table to place your project roughly before we speak.
Sometimes the site is fine and the real trouble is that nobody finds it. Then a rebuild is money in the wrong place: one-off technical SEO projects start from £2,500 and larger SEO programmes from £3,000 a month, and we will tell you if that is the better route.
| What drives the price | Nearer the starting price | Further up the range |
|---|---|---|
| Page templates | A handful: home, services, about, contact | Many distinct layouts, each designed separately |
| Content | You hand over finished words and photos | We write, edit or carry over hundreds of pages |
| Integrations | An enquiry form that sends an email | Booking, payments, a CRM or a stock system |
| Existing site | Nothing to migrate | Years of addresses that must be redirected |
| Selling online | No shop | A catalogue with variants and trade pricing |
| After launch | You host and maintain it yourselves | A care plan for updates, backups and small edits |
Choosing a supplier
The shortlist might hold a freelancer, a studio, website developers in Nottingham or a company further afield like us. The same six questions work on all of them, and the answers are worth having in writing.
The person who pitches is not always the person who builds. With so many freelancers and small studios in the city, passing the build to a subcontractor is common and can work well, but find out who will hold the code, and whose phone rings when a form stops sending.
If today’s site brings in work, ask how each old address will be forwarded and how anyone will know it worked. A shrug at this question is a costly warning.
Ask for a look behind the scenes of a site they built. If updating Christmas opening hours or adding a new case study needs a developer, nobody will bother, and the site will slowly go stale.
Open one of their recent sites on your own phone, on mobile data rather than office wi-fi. A design that looks impressive on a large monitor in a meeting tells you very little about how customers will meet it.
The domain, hosting account, code and content should be in your name, or pass to you on payment as the contract sets out. Renting your own website back from the people who built it is an avoidable trap.
Copywriting, photography, premium plugins, hosting and support after launch are the usual gaps between two quotes that look alike. A written scope that lists exclusions is the only fair way to compare them.
Beyond the city
Plenty of the firms looking for a web designer are not in the city centre at all. They are in Mansfield, Newark, Hucknall, Southwell or Bingham, or they work across the county from a van rather than a shopfront. For them the website has a slightly different job: it has to make clear which towns are covered, and it has to be found in those towns without pretending to have an address in each.
Many also sell across the East Midlands. Nottingham, Derby and Leicester sit close together, and trades, clinics and B2B suppliers often cover all three. The easy mistake is three area pages that are one page with the city name swapped, which search engines tend to treat as duplicates and assistants ignore. A page per area earns its place when it carries detail only that area has: the work done there, who covers it, and the questions those customers ask.
Where a business has a real address in a town, a Google Business Profile and a page for that branch make sense. Where it serves an area from somewhere else, the honest approach is a service-area profile and one clear page about coverage. We apply the same rule to ourselves, which is why this page says plainly that we have no Nottingham office.
Familiar faults
The same faults turn up on sites of every size, from a sole trader in Hucknall to a distributor off the M1. Hardly any of them are about appearance, which is why a purely visual refresh so often changes nothing that matters.
Rebuild or repair? Find out first
Our free website teardown is a short screen recording that walks through your current site and names three changes: one for loading speed, one for clarity and one for conversion. Use it with us, with another supplier or on your own.
Illustrations
Illustrations of the kind of work this involves, not client stories. Each one shows where we would start.
A Hockley boutique with a loyal walk-in trade and an online shop added later as a plugin. Product pages load slowly, categories are thin, and the stock shown online never matches the shelf. The work is a proper catalogue structure, one source of stock, and a checkout tested on a phone.
Aim: online orders that do not need checking against the shelf by hand
An accountancy or legal practice south of the river whose site was built years ago and still lists services it no longer offers. Clients check the people, the approach to fees and the regulatory details before they call. The work is clearer service pages, team pages that are easy to keep current, and a short enquiry form.
Aim: a site the partners are happy to send new clients to
A student lettings business whose properties live in PDFs and on third-party portals, so its own site has almost nothing a search engine can index. Demand follows the university calendar and most enquiries arrive from phones. The work is listings that can be filtered by area, bedrooms and price, with each enquiry routed to the right person.
Aim: properties findable on the agent’s own site, not only on portals
An engineering or packaging firm with a solid trade reputation and a site that is mostly a downloadable brochure. Buyers searching for a specific capability or part never land on it. The work is product and capability pages built from the catalogue, with specifications as text rather than images.
Aim: trade buyers reaching the right product page from a search
A technology or life sciences start-up near the university that put its first site together in a weekend before a funding round. It now needs to explain the product to customers rather than investors, publish news and recruit. The work is a structure that can grow, on a content system the team can run without help.
Aim: a site that changes as quickly as the company does
A heating or roofing firm working across Nottingham, Derby and Leicester whose three area pages are word for word the same. The work is one genuinely different page per area, a service-area profile instead of invented addresses, and a quote form that asks only what is needed to price the job.
Aim: each area page able to rank on its own merits
The process
Calls happen on video, documents live in shared folders, and one named contact stays with you from the first conversation to the day your staff take over. No building starts until the scope is signed off.
A conversation about the business, the customers the site should attract, and what the current one does well or badly. If you do not need a new site, you will hear that on the call.
Pages, templates, integrations, who supplies which words and pictures, what is left out, and the price, all written down and agreed before work begins.
The page structure and key templates come first, walked through with you on a shared screen. The visual design then follows your existing brand.
Server-rendered, accessible and built on the platform you chose, with your content in place and the redirect list drawn from every page on the old site.
Redirects tried, every form sent and received, Search Console connected, and your staff walked through editing. After that, the optional care plan picks up updates, backups and small changes.
Clear scope · Regular demos · Full handover
Is it a match?
We are engineers who build websites, not a creative agency that also codes. That suits some Nottingham projects well and others badly, so here is the honest split before you spend time on a call.
Make an informed choice
Most people looking for a web design agency in Nottingham end up deciding between three kinds of supplier. Each is right for a different job, and we are only one of the three.
| Factor | Freelance designer | Studio in Nottingham | SpiderHunts, working remotely |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meeting in person | Often possible | Yes, usually at their studio | No: video calls and shared screens |
| Who does the work | One person, design and build | A team; ask whether development is in-house | Our own engineers, design and build together |
| Holidays and sickness | Depends on one person’s availability | Usually covered by colleagues | Covered by the team |
| Strongest at | Small brochure sites on a tight budget | Brand, creative and workshops in the room | Speed, migrations, integrations and search |
| Branding and logos | Some offer it | Often a core service | No: we work from your existing brand |
| Price | Usually the lowest outlay | Varies with team size and creative input | Websites from £3,000, quoted in writing |
| After launch | Depends on their diary | Retainers are common | Optional care plan from £150 a month |
Sectors
Nottingham’s economy is broad: health and life sciences around the universities and the teaching hospitals, financial services, retail, higher education, and creative and digital businesses in and around the Lace Market, with manufacturing, engineering and distribution across the county. Each asks something different of a website.
FAQ
Questions owners in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire usually raise before signing off a website budget.
Still have a question?
Ask us directly. A senior engineer reads every question.
Ask about your projectNo. SpiderHunts has a registered office in London and a remote team, and works with Nottingham businesses through video calls, shared documents and a named contact. There are no premises in Nottingham, and it seemed better to put that at the top of this list than leave you to discover it.
With us, a business website starts from £3,000 plus VAT, and the optional care plan from £150 a month plus VAT. Being in Nottingham does not alter that. What does: how many distinct page layouts are needed, how much writing or carrying over of content is involved, any connection to booking, payment or stock systems, and whether an established site has to be moved without losing its traffic. You get a written quote with scope agreed up front. Quotes around the city can differ a great deal, so line up what each includes, not only the bottom line.
For a small brochure site on a tight budget, a capable freelancer can be exactly right, especially if face-to-face meetings matter to you. A company with a team earns its fee when the site links to other systems, holds search traffic you cannot afford to lose, or needs someone available when one person is ill, on holiday or tied up with another client. Either way, ask who will be looking after the site a couple of years from now.
Yes. WordPress makes sense when staff will regularly publish news, vacancies or case studies themselves. We keep the theme light, use the block editor rather than a bulky page builder where it fits, and install as few plugins as possible, since neglected plugins are a common route into small WordPress sites. We also adopt existing WordPress sites that nobody has dared to update in a while.
Yes, if the redirects are handled carelessly. Traffic usually goes missing when old addresses are forwarded by a general rule and the awkward exceptions, often the oldest pages with the most links, slip through. We work from the complete list of pages Google has indexed or visitors use, give each one a destination on the new site, try every redirect on a test copy and inspect them again after go-live.
Only if each page can say something the others cannot. Three pages with the city name swapped tend to be treated as duplicates. A page per area works when it carries real detail for that area: the jobs you do there, who covers it and the questions those customers ask. If you cannot write that yet, one clear page about where you work is better than three thin ones.
Yes, and we plan for it from the start. The platform is picked around the people who will edit it, and before launch they get a walkthrough of changing text, adding pages and replacing images. Sites that need a developer for every tweak tend to freeze, which is why plenty of fairly new websites already look neglected.
That is not something we do. We are a software company, and identity work is a specialist craft of its own. If you already have a brand, we apply it with care; if you need one, hire a brand designer and we will build the website alongside them.
Yes. The optional care plan, from £150 a month, includes hosting on a managed server we set up, together with updates, backups, speed checks, small monthly changes and a basic SEO health check. If you already have hosting you trust, we can deploy to it instead. In both cases the accounts should sit in your name.
Fill in the form on this page, book a free 30-minute call, or request a free teardown of the site you have now. You will get questions back, a suggested approach and a price range in pounds, or a straight answer if the project is not one for us.
Start here
A short note is enough: what the business does, which customers across Nottingham and Nottinghamshire the site should bring in, and what frustrates you about the current one. We will answer with questions, a proposed approach and a price range in pounds, and if a rebuild is not the right move, we will tell you.
Thanks, that’s with us.
A senior engineer reads every enquiry and will reply as soon as they can.
Book a time that suits you, or send a message on WhatsApp.