Type "web designer Leicester" into Google and you'll get freelancers, marketing agencies, print shops that do websites, and studios like ours, all on the same page and all promising roughly the same thing.
They aren't the same thing. Each is the right answer for a particular kind of project, and most disappointing websites come from hiring the wrong kind rather than a bad one.
Here's how to tell them apart.
The freelancer
One person, usually designing and building, often on WordPress or a site builder like Squarespace or Webflow.
Good for: a small business that needs a clean, credible site with a handful of pages and a contact form. A good Leicester freelancer will turn that round quickly, for a sensible price, and you'll always know who you're talking to.
Watch for: single points of failure. If they get busy, ill, or take a full-time job, your site has no one behind it. We inherit a lot of sites whose original builder can no longer be reached. Ask who has access to the hosting and the domain, and make sure the answer includes you.
The marketing agency
A team whose main business is SEO, social, ads or branding, with web design as one of the services.
Good for: businesses that want one supplier for the website and the marketing that drives traffic to it. If the site is mostly a destination for campaigns, that can work well.
Watch for: who builds it. Many marketing agencies design in-house and subcontract the development, sometimes offshore. That's the gap where sites end up looking like the design and behaving like something else. Ask: are your developers on the payroll, and can I speak to one?
The studio
A small team of designers and developers who work together on every project. That's what we are, so weigh this section accordingly.
Good for: sites that have to do something. A quoting tool, a trade portal, bookings, stock that syncs with your accounting system, a configurator. The design and the engineering have to be decided together, or one of them gets compromised.
Watch for: paying for capability you don't need. If your site is genuinely five pages of content, a studio is probably overkill, and a good one will tell you so.
Which one does your project need?
Answer these honestly:
| If your site needs to... | Start with |
|---|---|
| Explain what you do and get people to call | A good freelancer |
| Be the landing point for ongoing ad and SEO campaigns | A marketing agency with in-house developers |
| Take payments, bookings, or quotes with real logic behind them | A studio |
| Connect to your CRM, stock or accounting systems | A studio |
| Be updated weekly by your own team | Anyone, as long as the CMS is built around your content |
If you're somewhere in the middle, talk to one of each. The way they describe your project back to you will tell you more than any portfolio.
What it costs in Leicester
Roughly, and it varies more by complexity than by the type of supplier:
- A template-led small business site: £3,000 to £8,000
- A custom-designed marketing site: £8,000 to £25,000
- Anything with real functionality behind it: more, and it should be scoped before it's priced
Our own website projects mostly land between £5,000 and £30,000, with a fixed price agreed before anything starts. There's a fuller breakdown in how much a website costs, and a guide to what it costs to run once it's live.
Questions that work on all three
Whoever you're talking to:
- Who designs it, who builds it, and can I meet both?
- Who owns the code, domain and hosting when it's done?
- Show me something you built that does more than look good.
- What happens when something breaks six months after launch?
- When would you tell me not to hire you?
For a deeper version aimed at agencies specifically, see our guide to choosing a web design agency in Leicester and the questions to ask a development agency.
Where we fit
We're at Dock on Exploration Drive, near the science park off the A6, with a second studio in Huddersfield. Designers and developers in one team, building on Laravel, and 88% of our clients stay with us after launch.
If your project sounds like the studio column, here's how we approach web design in Leicester. If it sounds like the freelancer column, we'll happily say so and point you somewhere sensible.
