You need a website. You’ve asked around, maybe Googled “web designers Maidstone”, and the quotes make no sense. One person wants a few hundred pounds. Another wants several thousand. A mate says just use Wix. They might all be right, for different businesses. Here is how to work out which one is right for yours.
The real problem
The question is not “how much does a website cost?” The question is: what does it cost you to have the wrong one? A site that looks fine but sends no enquiries is not cheaper than a site that works. It is just a sunk cost with a nice font.
Before you pick a path, do this sum. Think about how many new customers you need per month to make a website worth having. Multiply that by your average job value. That number is your ceiling - what the site needs to return before you’ve broken even. Keep it in your head as you read the three options below.
Option 1: A builder you run yourself - Wix or Squarespace
Wix starts at around £9 per month for a basic plan; their business plans run £25-£35 per month at current published rates. Squarespace sits in a similar range. You can be live in a weekend. No agency, no waiting, no invoice.
This is genuinely the right answer for some businesses. If you are a sole trader testing an idea, a therapist who just needs a booking link and a face, or a local club that needs an address online - a builder works. Dont overthink it.
Where it falls down: the builder owns your site. If Wix changes its pricing or shuts a feature, you adapt or you leave - and leaving means rebuilding from scratch. The templates are shared by millions of other businesses, so standing out is harder than the adverts suggest. And the moment you need something specific - a booking system that talks to your diary, a product feed, a form that routes enquiries to the right person - you hit a wall fast. You can extend with apps, but each app adds a monthly fee and another moving part you have to manage.
Right for: early-stage businesses, tight budgets, simple requirements. Wrong for: anyone who needs the site to do a specific job reliably over time.
Option 2: A designer adapts a template
This is what most “web design in Maidstone” quotes actually describe. A designer buys a premium theme, drops in your logo and copy, adjusts the colours, and hands it over. The underlying structure is someone else’s work; the designer’s job is fitting it to you.
Done well, this produces a solid site in one to three weeks at a fraction of custom cost. The templates used by good designers are built by specialists and tested on thousands of sites - the bones are usually sound.
Where it falls down: you are working within someone else’s decisions. If the template was built for a restaurant and you are a drainage contractor, some things will feel forced. More importantly, the site is only as good as the designer’s judgement about what your customers actually need to see before they pick up the phone. A lot of template builds look fine and convert badly, because the structure was never questioned - it was just filled in.
Ask any designer you’re considering this: “How do you decide what goes on the homepage?” If the answer is “we follow the template”, that tells you something.
Right for: established businesses that need a credible online presence without a long build. Wrong for: businesses where the website is the primary sales channel and every enquiry counts.
Option 3: A custom build
A custom build starts from your customers and works backwards. What are they searching for? What do they need to see to trust you? What action do you want them to take? The structure, the copy, the page order - all of it is decided for your business, not borrowed from a theme.
This takes longer and costs more. Thats the honest version. The question is whether the return justifies it.
Here is how to think about it on your own numbers. Take the sum you did earlier - your monthly ceiling. Now ask: if a better-structured site converted even one extra customer per month, what is that worth over a year? For a Maidstone tradesperson with a £600 average job, one extra enquiry a month that converts is £7,200 a year. That changes the maths on what a build is worth.
We built the first website for Walk On The Wild Side Reptiles & Aquatics in Ashford. Month one: 1,500 visits, 39 enquiries, roughly 20 sales and 8 reservations, with 75% of traffic arriving from Google. That came from building the site around what their customers were actually searching for - not from a template that looked nice.
Right for: businesses where the website is doing real commercial work - generating enquiries, booking appointments, moving stock. Wrong for: anyone who just needs a presence and isnt relying on the site to grow.
Which one should you choose?
Use a builder if you are starting out, your budget is tight, and you mainly need to exist online. Use a template build if you need something credible quickly and your sales mostly come from referrals or repeat business. Commission a custom build when the website is a primary source of new work and you can see the return in your numbers.
Most Maidstone businesses asking about web design are somewhere between options two and three. The right answer depends on your job value, your volume, and how much of your growth you want the site to carry.
Want to know which applies to you?
If you bring your rough numbers - jobs per month, average value, where enquiries currently come from - we can tell you in one conversation whether a custom build makes sense or whether a simpler route does the job. We’ll say so either way. See how we work, then start that conversation.