Web design and development
A website that actually produces enquiries.
Most business websites look acceptable and convert badly. The difference between the two is rarely taste. It is speed, clarity, whether the next step is obvious, and whether the site works for the person using it on a five year old phone on a bad connection.
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- 92% client retention in 2025
- 100+ businesses and clinics
- 20+ years in the industry
Somebody reads this before the call.
Tell us what the site has to do and what is getting in the way. A strategist looks at how the current site loads, how it reads on a phone and where enquiries are being lost before you speak to anyone, so the call starts at your site rather than a pitch.
What makes a business website actually produce enquiries?
Four things, in this order. The page has to load fast enough that people stay: Google's Core Web Vitals thresholds are 2.5 seconds for Largest Contentful Paint, 200 milliseconds for Interaction to Next Paint and 0.1 for Cumulative Layout Shift, measured at the 75th percentile of real visits. It has to say within one screen what you do, where, and what to do next. It has to be usable by everyone, including keyboard and screen reader users. And every enquiry path has to be tracked, or you are guessing about the rest.
Design taste matters less than most people expect. A plain, fast, clear site beats an award winning one that takes six seconds to paint on a phone.
A rebuild is not automatically the answer. Often the enquiry problem is one page, one form, or one load time, and fixing that costs a fraction of a new site.
Written and maintained by the VIS Mountain team. Last reviewed . The sources behind it are listed below.
Design, development, and the gap between them
Design decides what a page says, in what order, and how it looks. Development decides whether that page loads quickly, works on every device, survives an update, and can be edited by you afterwards. Most disappointing websites are a design problem dressed up as a development problem, or the reverse.
A site that has been designed but not engineered looks beautiful in a mockup and ships with four megabytes of images, a slider that blocks the first paint, and six third party scripts loading before the headline appears.
A site that has been engineered but not designed loads instantly and tells a visitor nothing useful in the first screen, so they leave anyway.
We treat the two as one job with one owner. The same person who decides that the phone number belongs in the header on mobile is the person who knows what that decision costs in layout shift.
How a page is actually put together
A website is not drawn as a picture and then coloured in. It is set out as blocks, each with one job, and built in the order a visitor reads them.
Agreeing the wireframe before any colour goes on is what keeps a build on schedule. It is far cheaper to move a grey box than to redesign a finished section.
How a build actually runs
Timelines depend far more on how quickly content and approvals come back than on how long the building takes. That is worth knowing before you start.
Plan the pages before designing any of them
A page list, a purpose for each page, and the URL each one will live at. This is where migration decisions get made: what is being kept, what is being merged, what is being retired and redirected. Sites that skip this step lose rankings at launch, and it is entirely avoidable.
- One page per real thing you sell, not one page per keyword
- A written redirect map from every old URL that has traffic or links
- Decisions about what each page has to make happen before it is designed
Write the content before designing around it
Layout designed around placeholder text produces boxes that real copy does not fit. We write or edit the copy first, using facts you supply, then design to it. This is also the slowest stage on most projects, because it needs decisions only you can make.
Design the key templates, not every page
Home, a service page, a location page, a contact page and whatever else is genuinely different. Everything else is a variation of those. Designing fifty unique pages produces a site nobody can maintain.
See the remaining steps: How a build actually runsHide the remaining steps: How a build actually runs
Build to a performance and accessibility budget
Image weight, font loading, script count and layout stability are decided during the build rather than fixed afterwards. Keyboard operation, focus visibility, heading structure, form labels and contrast are checked as each template is built, not audited at the end when changing them is expensive.
Instrument before launch
Analytics, call tracking, form submission events and conversion actions are in place and tested before the site goes live, so there is a before and after rather than a gap.
Launch, then watch
Redirects verified, search console re-submitted, forms tested from a real phone on a real network, and field performance data watched for the first few weeks, because lab scores and real visits often disagree.
You own the domain, the hosting and the site throughout. We will not hold a website hostage to keep a client.
What a tenth of a second is worth
Google commissioned Deloitte and 55 to measure this across 37 European and American brand sites and more than 30 million user sessions. It was published in 2020 and remains the largest public study of its kind.
SourceMilliseconds Make Millions, Google with Deloitte and 55, 2020, 37 sites and 30M+ sessions
Those are correlations from one 2020 study, not a promise about your site. What they establish is that speed work is conversion work, which is why we treat it as part of the build rather than an upsell afterwards.
The three numbers Google actually publishes
There is no secret speed score. Google publishes the thresholds and the percentile they are measured at.
Largest Contentful Paint is how long until the main thing on screen appears. Interaction to Next Paint is how long the page takes to visibly respond when you tap something. Cumulative Layout Shift is how much the page jumps around while it loads, which is what makes you tap the wrong button.
Measuring at the 75th percentile matters. It means three quarters of real visits have to be good, so an average that is dragged up by fast desktop users on fibre does not count as a pass.
The nine pieces this breaks into
A new build uses most of these at once. An existing site usually needs one or two of them, which is a much smaller conversation.
WordPress Web Design
Custom WordPress builds you can maintain, without a page builder that locks you in.
Shopify Design and Development
Storefronts built around the buying decision, not just the theme demo.
Website Speed Optimization
Core Web Vitals work on an existing site, measured on real visits rather than a lab score.
Website Accessibility
WCAG 2.1 AA remediation, tested with a keyboard and a screen reader rather than only a scanner.
Conversion Rate Optimization
Finding where visitors drop out and fixing that instead of buying more traffic.
Website Care and Hosting
Updates, backups, monitoring and hardening, so the site does not quietly rot.
Landing Page Design
Single purpose pages built for one campaign, one offer and one action.
Sales Funnels
The sequence of pages, forms and follow up that carries a stranger to a booked appointment.
Website Redesign
Rebuilding a site that has aged, without losing the rankings and links it has already earned.
Almost every site fails accessibility
WebAIM runs an automated analysis of the top one million home pages every year. Automated testing only catches part of what matters, which makes these figures a floor rather than a ceiling.
SourceThe WebAIM Million, WebAIM at Utah State University, 2026
We build to WCAG 2.1 Level AA as standard rather than as an add on, and we test it with a keyboard and a screen reader rather than only with an automated scan, which is the check that actually catches the failures above.
Why a site gets traffic and no enquiries
Ranked by how often we find each one when a client says the website does not work.
- The first screen does not say what you do, where you do it, or what happens next. A visitor should not have to scroll to learn whether they are in the right place.
- The phone number is not tappable on mobile, or is an image, or is only in the footer.
- A contact form with nine fields, several of them required, asking for information you do not need until later.
- Form submissions going to an address nobody checks, or silently failing since a plugin update. This is more common than it sounds and costs more than every other item here combined.
- No evidence that anyone real works there: no names, no faces, no credentials, no work shown.
See the full checklist: Why a site gets traffic and no enquiriesHide the full checklist: Why a site gets traffic and no enquiries
- Service pages that describe a category rather than answering the question the visitor actually has, which is whether you do their specific thing and roughly what it involves.
- A page that takes six seconds to become usable on a phone, by which time a meaningful share of visitors have left.
- Nothing measured, so nobody can tell which of the above is actually happening.
Item four is worth checking today, whoever built your site. Submit your own contact form from a phone on mobile data and see whether anything arrives.
Where the website sits in the journey
A website is rarely where a customer starts. It is where they arrive after they have already done most of their choosing.
That is why a site with plenty of visitors and no enquiries is nearly always a step four problem: the proof is thin, the button is hard to find, or the page is slow enough on a phone that people leave before either appears.
Choosing a platform honestly
There is no universally correct answer. There is an answer that fits how much you want to change, how often, and by whom.
| Item | Best for | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| Hosted site builder | A small site you will rarely change, launched quickly | Limited control over speed and markup, and export is rarely clean |
| WordPress with a page builder | Teams who want to edit visually without a developer | Page weight, and being locked into the builder's markup if you ever leave it |
| WordPress, custom theme | Content heavy sites that need speed and structure | Needs someone to maintain it, updates are not optional |
| Shopify | Selling physical products, where checkout is the hard part | App creep, which is where the speed goes |
| Custom framework build | Sites where performance or bespoke functionality is the point | You need a developer to change anything structural |
We will recommend the cheapest option that meets the requirement. If a hosted builder genuinely fits what you need, we will say so.
How a website is measured, and what changes by industry
Bounce rate is close to meaningless on a site where the ideal visit is one page and a phone call. Time on page rewards confusion. Page views per session rewards people not finding what they wanted.
The measures that matter are conversion rate by page, so you know which pages earn their place; form and call volume split by source; the share of visits that reach the contact page at all; and Core Web Vitals from real visits, which Search Console reports from field data rather than a lab test.
Read the full breakdown: How a website is measured, and what changes by industryHide the full breakdown: How a website is measured, and what changes by industry
A PageSpeed Insights score out of 100 is a diagnostic tool, not a target. A site can score 100 in the lab and fail Core Web Vitals in the field, because the lab test does not have your visitors' devices, networks or third party scripts. We optimise for the field data and use the lab score to find out why.
One honest caveat about conversion testing: most local business sites do not have enough traffic for a statistically valid A/B test in a reasonable period. Where that is true we say so and make changes based on qualitative evidence and known usability principles instead of pretending the arithmetic works.
What counts as a good result also varies by industry. Healthcare sites carry constraints that change the design: outcome claims are restricted, patient photography needs authorisation, and anything collecting patient information brings privacy obligations that shape which third party scripts are acceptable on which pages. Legal sites sit under state bar advertising rules, which differ by state and affect testimonials and case results.
Home services sites live or die on trust signals and speed of contact, so licence numbers, insurance, service area and a phone number that works with one tap matter more than a portfolio. E-commerce is a different discipline again, because the hardest part is not the visit, it is the checkout, and that is covered in detail on the e-commerce SEO and Shopify pages.
What we need from you, and what it costs in time
The honest version: a website build needs more of your attention than most people plan for, and almost all of it is at the start.
Content decisions. Which services you want to lead with, your real hours, your real service area, the names and credentials of the people doing the work, and photography of the actual premises and team if you have it. Stock photography of a stranger in a lab coat is worse than no photograph.
Read the full breakdown: What we need from you, and what it costs in timeHide the full breakdown: What we need from you, and what it costs in time
Access. Domain registrar, current hosting, the existing site, and analytics. Recovering a domain from a former developer is a common and avoidable delay.
Decisions inside a window. One named person with authority to approve. Review by committee is the single largest cause of a timeline doubling, and it is not something we can absorb from our side.
After launch, someone who answers the enquiries. A site that produces twenty enquiries a month for a business that replies to them in two days is not the site's fault.
We do not publish a price for this piece of work on its own, because the right scope depends on what already exists. What is published is the bundle pricing: 2,400, 3,600 or 4,800 dollars a month depending on which channels are running. You can read the full breakdown on the pricing page, and you will get an exact number in writing before anything starts.
Where this sits against the other services
The site is the floor under everything else. Search work is capped by whether pages can be crawled and load quickly. Paid advertising is capped by landing page quality, which Google explicitly counts inside Ad Rank, so a slow page raises the price of every click you buy.
Branding decides what the site looks and sounds like. In practice we would rather settle identity questions before a build than relitigate them during one.
Reputation and CRM work decides what happens after the form is submitted. A build that ends at the thank you page has finished half the job.
In their own words.
These come from our Google Business Profile as they are written, not retyped onto this page, which means what you are reading is whatever is true today rather than whatever was true when the page was built.
Find out whether you need a rebuild or a repair.
We will look at your current site, its field performance data and where enquiries are actually leaking, and tell you honestly whether the fix is a new build or three specific changes.
Straight answers.
Do I own the website when it is done?
Yes. The site, the domain and the hosting are yours, and stay yours. We will not hold a website hostage to keep you as a client.
That includes the ability to move it. If you leave, you get the files, the database and the access, without a negotiation.
How long does a build take?
It depends on the page count and, far more, on how quickly content and approvals come back. You will get a page count, a timeline and a launch date in writing before we start.
The parts we control are predictable. The parts you control are where projects actually slip, which is why we agree a review window up front.
Do I really need a new website, or can the current one be fixed?
Often it can be fixed. If the platform is sound, the structure is reasonable and the problem is speed, clarity or a broken form, targeted work is cheaper and faster than a rebuild.
A rebuild is the right call when the platform is unmaintainable, the structure fights search, or the site cannot be made accessible without rewriting the templates anyway. We will tell you which one you are in.
Will a redesign hurt my rankings?
It can, and that is nearly always a migration failure rather than a design failure. Rankings are lost when URLs change without redirects, when content is thinned out in the name of a cleaner design, or when the new site is slower than the old one.
A written redirect map and a page by page content comparison before launch prevents most of it.
How fast should my site be?
Google publishes the thresholds: Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, and Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1, measured at the 75th percentile of real page loads.
Those are the numbers to hold anyone to, including us. They are visible to you in Search Console without needing a tool from an agency.
Does my website need to be accessible?
We build every site to WCAG 2.1 Level AA, which is the standard referenced in United States web accessibility guidance and the one procurement teams ask about.
We are not lawyers and will not tell you what any particular law requires of your business. What we will tell you is what we build to, and how it is tested: keyboard, screen reader and contrast checking, not only an automated scan.
Can I edit the site myself afterwards?
Yes, and we will show you how on a call that is recorded so you can rewatch it. Text, images, staff, hours and service pages should all be editable without a developer.
Structural change is different. If a page type needs to work in a new way, that is development work, and we would rather say so than build a system so flexible that it is slow and nobody can use it.
Where this comes from.
Primary documentation and published research behind the guidance on this page.
- Core Web Vitals, web.dev (opens in a new tab)
- WCAG 2 checklist, WebAIM (opens in a new tab)A practical summary of the Level A and AA success criteria.
- The WebAIM Million accessibility analysis (opens in a new tab)
- PageSpeed Insights (opens in a new tab)
- ADA.gov guidance on web accessibility (opens in a new tab)
- Google Search Console Help (opens in a new tab)
Talk to the team
A short call, a look at how the business currently shows up, and a straight answer on what we would do first.