Web design in Yorkshire: what to look for, and what to avoid

Look for a web designer who can show you what changed for their clients, in numbers, and who’ll tell you the price before the third meeting. Avoid anyone whose portfolio is all pretty screenshots and no results. Whether they’re in Leeds or Hull matters a lot less than either of those.

I run Genius Division in Barnsley, so I’m not exactly neutral. I’ve already written about hiring a web designer in Barnsley (meeting face to face, showing up on the local map, that sort of thing). This is the wider-Yorkshire version, with real examples from Yorkshire organisations we’ve worked with, because a “what to look for” list costs nothing to write and numbers are harder to fake.

Does it matter where in Yorkshire they are?

Not much. Yorkshire’s massive. Somebody in Hull and somebody in Skipton both count as local, and neither of them is nipping round to yours for a brew on a Tuesday afternoon. (If they are, ask what else they’re doing with their week.)

What matters more is whether they’ve built something for a business that looks like yours. A farm attraction, a college group, a glass manufacturer and a leisure trust all need very different things from a website, and an agency that’s done one of them well already knows where the problems are before you’ve told them.

Ask what changed, in numbers

Every agency website says “stunning”, “bespoke”, “results-driven” and “passionate”. Bespoke what, exactly? Ask what changed after the website went live and how they know.

This is the sort of answer you want.

Cannon Hall Farm is a working farm attraction in Barnsley. They sold tickets through an off-the-shelf platform that was a perfectly good bit of software and couldn’t do half of what the farm wanted. So we built them their own. It’s taken over 219,000 bookings and sold more than £10 million in tickets. Ticket revenue is up 12.9% year on year on 4.6% more visitors, and around 70% of bookings now add paid parking at checkout, which is money that used to get left at the gate.

RNN Group run Rotherham College, Dearne Valley College, North Notts College and University Centre Rotherham. Two-thirds of Rotherham College’s visitors are on a phone, and the old sites didn’t work properly on one. Since we rebuilt the group’s five websites, Dearne Valley’s traffic is up 21.6% year on year, and Rotherham College’s site drove 10,000 “apply now” actions in a year with email enquiries up 401%.

Those are numbers somebody can check. If all an agency can tell you is that the client loved it, that’s nice for them.

Do they ask how you make money?

The first meeting should be mostly them asking about your business. Where do your enquiries come from now? What do people ring up and ask? Who are you losing work to? What does a good customer look like?

If they spend that meeting showing you scroll animations, they’re designing for their own portfolio. A lot of agencies build what I’d call designer-first websites, all wow factor and fancy transitions, the kind that win awards. Great fun on the first visit, and a right pain when you come back a week later looking for the phone number. Business owners have started picking agencies on how pretty the portfolio looks rather than what the work did, and the agencies have noticed. I had a proper rant about it.

▶Play the video: Webflow is ruining websites

Pretty’s fine. I’m a designer, I like pretty. It just comes after the website loads fast and makes it obvious what you do.

Who’s taking the photos?

Nobody believes the grinning bloke in the hard hat is your foreman.

Glasscraft are one of the UK’s only independent glass manufacturers, with over 150 people across three facilities in Yorkshire and the North West. Their old website was 15 years old and showed none of that. We made ourselves one promise at the start, which was no stock photos, then spent days at their factories photographing the actual team and the actual glass coming off the line. Every face on the site works there.

We built them a Quick Quote tool too, which brings in 60 to 80 quote requests a month. And we wired the site into their manufacturing system so customers can check their own orders. That gets used 100 to 200 times a month, and each one is a phone call the team doesn’t have to take.

So ask who’s doing the photography. If the answer is “we’ll find some nice images”, you’ll end up looking like everybody else in your trade.

What to avoid

A different provider for every website

If your organisation runs more than one website, watch for this.

Barnsley Premier Leisure trade as Your Space: ten leisure clubs, the Barnsley Metrodome with its waterpark, a golf business, swim and gymnastics academies. When we came in, all of that was spread across four different web providers, each with its own build and its own idea of what the brand looked like. Every security update got paid for over and over. Somebody who swam at the Metrodome and did a class at Royston looked like two different people.

We moved the lot onto one platform. It handles more than 1.5 million visits a year, and a fix made once goes out to every site. RNN’s colleges work the same way, each with its own look and one foundation underneath, so the group isn’t paying to solve the same problem four times.

Software you have to bend your business around

Back to Cannon Hall Farm. They were running the farm around what their old ticketing platform allowed. Ideas like a free return pass when it rains, or a membership scheme, were either a clumsy workaround or a flat no. Now, if it rains over a set amount on your visit, the system sends you a free return pass on its own. On one wet day in May it issued 416 of them.

If a web designer’s answer to “can it do this?” is “the plugin doesn’t support that”, ask what it would cost to build. You’re allowed to decide it’s too much, once somebody’s actually told you the number.

A £50 template with your logo on it

Most of our clients come to us to replace exactly that. If somebody’s quoting a “fully custom” website for a few hundred quid, it isn’t. I’ve written more about why in buy cheap, buy twice.

What does web design cost in Yorkshire?

Same as anywhere else. There’s no Yorkshire discount, sadly.

Our web design starts from £5,000 and most projects land between £8,000 and £12,000. Anything with a shop, a booking system or a member area goes above that. Most go live in eight to twelve weeks. The thing that slows them down is getting the words and photos together. It’s all on the pricing page.

If you come and see us in Barnsley, the tea’s Yorkshire. I’m not having that argument.