# hadd. studio

## Site
- Canonical URL: https://www.haddstudio.co.uk
- Generated: 2026-07-25T09:38:49.012Z

## Pages
- [Home](https://www.haddstudio.co.uk/): hadd. studio | websites that help your business grow
Haddenham, Buckinghamshire based web design and development studio
- [Blog](https://www.haddstudio.co.uk/blog)
- [FAQs](https://www.haddstudio.co.uk/faqs)
- [Privacy Policy](https://www.haddstudio.co.uk/privacy-policy) (legal)
- [Terms & Conditions](https://www.haddstudio.co.uk/terms-and-conditions) (legal)

## Home page summary
### websites that help your business grow.
Web design and development studio. With you from design to launch and beyond, building fast, modern websites.

about hadd.

A good website should bring you business. Fast to load, easy to find, and simple to keep up to date, so every customer who lands on it gets the right first impression of you.

That’s exactly what we build. Every site we make loads quickly and works properly on any device. If you want to edit your own content, we can set you up with a simple editing system so you can make changes yourself, no developer required. We don’t use WordPress or off-the-shelf templates either, which means your site won’t look like every other site in your industry.

Most of all, we care about the work. Your website isn’t churned out and forgotten. We build it properly, then look after it for as long as you need us.
#### specialising in.
##### web design.

##### web development.

##### seo.
##### ongoing support.

### our services.
website packages.
analytics and insights.
- **launch.** — introductory price from £650
    For new businesses that need a professional site online without a big upfront cost
    - 1-3 pages
    - Templated page and design
    - Optimised for mobile, tablet and desktop
    - Basic SEO setup
    - Contact form
    - Hosting from £30 per month
- **grow.** — introductory price from £2000
    For growing businesses that want their website to bring in enquiries, not just sit there looking nice
    - Up to 8 pages
    - Custom page and design
    - Optimised for mobile, tablet and desktop
    - CMS for easy content editing and updates
    - SEO setup and search optimised page structure
    - Contact forms and basic integrations
    - Hosting, edits, maintenance, SEO and ongoing updates from £80 per month
- **scale.** — price on application
    For established businesses ready to make their website work as hard as they do
    - Fully bespoke page and design
    - Optimised for mobile, tablet and desktop
    - CMS for easy content editing and updates
    - SEO setup for long term growth, including Google Business Profile review or setup
    - Contact forms and complex integrations
    - Support, hosting, edits, maintenance, SEO and ongoing updates from £125 per month
- **monitor.** — £99 setup then £25/month
    For businesses that want the basics: who's visiting your site and how they found you
    - Analytics set up on your site from day one
    - Visitor and traffic source tracking
    - Google Search Console setup
    - Cookie consent banner, styled to match your site and compliant with UK privacy rules
    - A simple monthly report in plain English
- **analyse.** — £199 setup then £45/month
    For businesses that want a deeper insight into how their website is performing
    - Everything in monitor
    - Enquiry and contact form tracking, so you know what's converting
    - Search performance and keyword reporting
    - Google Business Profile insights
    - Monthly report with clear recommendations you can act on
- **optimise.** — £349 setup then £95/month
    For established businesses that want the full picture across every channel
    - Everything in analyse
    - Conversion tracking across calls, forms and bookings
    - A custom dashboard you can check any time
    - Heatmaps and visitor recordings that show where people click, scroll and drop off
    - Quarterly review call to plan what's next

### let's talk.
Tell us a little about your business and what you’re looking to work with us on, whether you’re starting from scratch or replacing a site that isn’t working for you. We’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

## FAQs
### Do you build websites for businesses in Aylesbury and Buckinghamshire?
Yes. hadd. studio is based in Haddenham, a few miles from both Aylesbury and Thame, and we build websites for businesses across Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. Being local means we can actually sit down with you and get to know how your business works before we build anything.

### Can we meet in person to talk about my website?
Yes. If you're in or around Aylesbury, Thame, Haddenham, or High Wycombe, we're happy to meet for a coffee and talk through what you need. There's no charge for a first chat, and we won't drown you in jargon.

### Why choose a local web designer over a big agency?
With a local studio you deal directly with the person building your site rather than an account manager. Our clients are also our neighbours, so our reputation rides on every site we put out. You get the quality of an agency build without the overheads, or the three-day wait for someone to answer an email.

### How much does a new website cost?
It depends on the size of the site and what you need it to do. Our introductory prices start from as little as £650, and most full projects start from around £2,000. A monthly plan covers hosting, updates, and ongoing local SEO. Full details are on our pricing section, you'll get a written quote before any work starts, and the price we agree is the price you pay.

### How long does it take to build a website?
Most small business websites take 4 to 8 weeks from kick-off to launch. Content is usually what decides it. The sooner we have your text, photos, and logo, the sooner the site goes live, so we agree a timeline up front and flag anything likely to slow things down.

### Will I be able to update the website myself?
Yes. Every site comes with a simple editor where you can change text, photos, prices, and pages yourself. There's no code involved. We walk you through it at handover, and if you'd rather never touch it, content edits are included in our monthly plan.

### Do you use WordPress?
No. We build on a modern platform (Next.js with Sanity CMS) that loads faster and stays secure without the constant plugin updates WordPress needs. If you've been burned by a WordPress site that got slower and flakier every year, this is the alternative.

### Why does website speed matter for my business?
Slow websites lose customers. Most people give up on a page that takes more than a few seconds to load on their phone, and Google pushes slow sites down the results. We test every site on real mobile connections, because that's where most of your customers are.

### Do you offer hosting and maintenance?
Yes. Our monthly plan covers hosting, security, technical updates, and content edits, plus active local SEO so the site keeps working for you after launch rather than quietly going stale. It's one monthly price with nothing bolted on later.

### Can you help my business show up on Google?
Yes. Every site we build loads fast, works properly on phones, and is structured the way Google expects, with local signals for the areas you serve. We also help with your Google Business Profile and reviews, which do more for searches like "electrician in Aylesbury" than anything on the website itself.

### My website isn't working for me. Can you help?
Yes, starting with a free health check that looks at your site's speed, how it behaves on a phone, and how you show up on Google. We'll tell you honestly what state it's in. One thing we don't do is patch up another developer's code, because inherited problems have a way of coming back. If your site needs work, we rebuild it properly on our own platform.

### Do I own my website?
Yes. Your domain name, your content, and your site belong to you, and if you ever want to move on we hand everything over cleanly. 

## Blog posts
### test
URL: https://www.haddstudio.co.uk/blog/test
Published: 2026-07-25T09:32:24.620Z

test

### Why we don't take over other people's websites
URL: https://www.haddstudio.co.uk/blog/why-we-dont-take-over-other-peoples-websites
Published: 2026-07-24T23:08:06.537Z
We turn this work down regularly, and it costs us money to do it. The reasoning, the exceptions we do make, and the honest case against our own policy.

We turn this work down regularly. Somebody rings up with a WordPress site that has gone slow, or broken on phones, or quietly stopped ranking, and asks whether we could have a look and sort it out. The answer is usually no.

That costs us money and it occasionally annoys people, so it seems only fair to explain the reasoning properly rather than hiding behind one line in the FAQs.

What "just a few tweaks" actually means

Nobody rings up asking for a big job. They ring asking for a small one. Can you make it load faster. Can you fix the contact form. Can you make the menu work properly on an iPhone.

None of those stay small once you open the bonnet. Making a site load faster means working out why it is slow, which means auditing however many plugins are installed, the theme, the hosting, the photographs somebody uploaded at four thousand pixels wide, and whatever custom code a previous developer left behind with no comments and no explanation.

By the time you understand enough to change the small thing safely, you have done most of the work of a rebuild, and charged a fraction of the price for it.

You inherit the decisions and the blame

This is the part that settled it for us.

The moment we touch somebody else's site, we own it in the customer's mind. Three weeks later the contact form stops sending because of a plugin conflict that existed long before we arrived, and the phone call comes to us. Fairly, from where they are standing. They cannot see the line between the part we touched and the part we did not, and I would not expect them to.

So we either absorb the cost of fixing something we did not build, or we have an argument with somebody we like and will probably see in the Co-op. Neither of those is a business I want to be in.

The security side

There is a harder edged reason too. Patchstack, which tracks security issues across the WordPress ecosystem, recorded 11,334 new vulnerabilities in 2025, 91 percent of them in plugins. In 46 percent of cases the plugin developer had no fix available by the time the problem became public. For the vulnerabilities that get attacked hardest, the median gap between disclosure and the first exploitation attempt was five hours.

Now picture us agreeing to look after a site carrying twenty plugins, several last updated in 2021 by developers who have moved on to other things. We would have taken on responsibility for something we cannot actually secure. If it gets defaced, or starts quietly redirecting customers to a fake shop, our name is the one attached to it.

I would rather say no at the start than apologise in six months.

What we look at before we say no

Turning a job down is not a shrug. It usually follows twenty minutes of looking, and a handful of specific things decide it.

How many plugins are installed, and how many are still actively maintained. Whether the theme is a commercial one that has been modified, which makes every future update a gamble. Whether there is any version control at all, or whether five years of changes were made by editing files directly on the server. Whether the hosting is somewhere we could reasonably work. And whether anybody alive knows what the custom code is for.

Two or three of those going the wrong way and the honest price for making the site safe is higher than the price of starting again. At that point recommending the patch would be doing you a disservice, even though it would be easier to sell.

When we do say yes

There are exceptions, and I would rather list them than pretend we are absolutists about it.

A genuinely contained job with a clear edge to it. Adding a page, swapping photographs, changing text on a site that is otherwise healthy.

A site already built on something we know well, where we can read the whole thing in an afternoon and understand it.

Something urgent and human. If a site is down and somebody's business has stopped, we will help get it back up and have the longer conversation afterwards.

A health check. We will look at anybody's site and tell them what is wrong with it, for free, without touching a thing.

That last one matters more than the others. Refusing to take a site over is not the same as refusing to help. A fair number of health checks end with us telling somebody their website is fine and they should spend the money on their Google profile instead.

What we suggest instead

Usually one of three things. If the site is fundamentally sound and the developer has simply gone quiet, find another developer who works on that platform. There are plenty of good WordPress people around Aylesbury and Oxford, and that is genuinely the cheapest answer.

If the site is beyond saving, rebuild it, and use the opportunity to fix the ownership problem while you are at it. Domain in your own name. An editor you can actually use. The questions worth asking before you hire anybody cover most of what goes wrong the second time round.

And if you cannot tell which of those two situations you are in, ask somebody with no financial interest in the answer. That is what the free health check is for.

What people actually want when they ask

Underneath the request there is usually one of three things, and it helps to work out which one you are dealing with.

Sometimes it is money. The site cost two thousand pounds three years ago, and rebuilding feels like admitting that money has gone. Completely understandable, and it is what leads people to spend another eight hundred on patches that never touch the underlying problem.

Sometimes it is dread of the process. Rebuilding means decisions, content, photographs and time nobody has spare. Patching feels like the smaller ask. It generally is not, but it feels like it.

And sometimes it is loyalty. The person who built it was a friend, or a friend's son, and moving on feels like a betrayal. I have a great deal of sympathy for that one and no useful advice about it at all.

The version of this that is not about us

Take our particular policy out of it and there is a general point worth keeping.

Any developer who agrees to take on a site they have not seen the inside of, quotes a low fixed price for the work, and promises it will be quick, is either braver than me or has not looked properly. Inherited code is the most common reason small web projects overrun, because the estimate gets made before anybody knows what is actually in there.

So if you are gathering quotes to fix an existing site, the good sign is somebody who asks for admin access before quoting and comes back with a range rather than a single number. The bad sign is an instant fixed price, because that price is a guess, and guesses in this trade get corrected upwards rather than down.

One more exception, since it comes up often enough to be worth naming. If you have a site we did not build and you simply want somebody to keep the lights on, hosting renewed and nothing else changing, we will sometimes take that on. It is a narrow arrangement and we write down precisely what it does and does not cover, because standing still is a much smaller promise than moving forward.

The honest counterargument

There is a real case against this policy and it deserves stating properly.

A rebuild costs more than a patch. For a business that just needs the contact form working by Friday, being told "we would have to rebuild it" is unhelpful and possibly self serving. I am well aware that a policy of only working on our own builds happens to point every conversation towards a larger invoice, and that a sceptical reader should notice that.

What I can say is that we tell people when they do not need us, we do the health checks for nothing, and we would rather send somebody to a WordPress specialist than take their money for work we would do badly. Whether that holds up is something to judge from how we behave rather than from a blog post arguing that we behave well.

If you have a site causing you grief and want to know whether it is fixable or finished, get in touch. The health check covers speed, mobile behaviour and how you show up in search, and you will get a straight answer either way. Including the answer where the straight answer is that you do not need us at all.

### What to ask a web designer before you pay them anything
URL: https://www.haddstudio.co.uk/blog/questions-to-ask-a-web-designer
Published: 2026-07-24T23:06:22.454Z
You cannot judge the code and every portfolio looks fine, so judge the answers instead. The questions worth asking, including the ones that make my own life harder.

Most people hiring a web designer have no real way of judging whether the person opposite them is any good. You cannot assess the code. You probably cannot tell a good design from a merely fashionable one. And everybody's portfolio looks fine, because everybody only puts their best four jobs in it.

So judge them on their answers instead. These are the questions I would ask, including several that would make my own life harder if every client asked them.

Who owns everything when we are finished?

The most important question on the list, and the one that causes the most misery when it gets skipped.

You want the domain registered in your name, with you listed as the registrant, and access to the account it lives in. You want the content to be yours and exportable in a form somebody else could use. You want your own login to the CMS rather than shared access to theirs.

The failure mode here is rarely malice. It is usually a developer who set everything up under his own account in 2019 because it was quicker on the day, and has since stopped answering emails. Recovering a domain from a dormant company is genuinely difficult and occasionally impossible.

Can I edit it myself, and will you show me right now?

Everybody says yes to the first half of that question. The second half is where it gets interesting.

What you want to see is somebody logging into a real editor and changing a price or a phone number in front of you, on a site they built for somebody else. If it takes four clicks and no explanation, good. If they start explaining what a widget is and why the page builder does that, you have your answer.

This matters more than almost anything else here, because it decides whether your website is still telling the truth in three years.

What happens if you get hit by a bus?

Blunt, but ask it anyway. A single freelancer is a single point of failure, and most small business websites are built by single freelancers. Ours included, which is exactly why I think you should ask.

Reasonable answers: the code sits in a standard repository you can be given access to, the site is built on something other developers know, there is documentation, there is somebody who would pick it up. Unreasonable answer: a laugh and a change of subject.

What exactly is in the monthly fee?

Get it in writing and itemised. Hosting? Security updates? How many content edits, and what counts as one? Does it cover anything to do with Google? What is the response time when something breaks on a Saturday morning? I have written separately about what a website should cost, but the monthly figure is where most of the surprises live.

Then ask the question underneath it. What happens if I stop paying? If the answer is that the site goes offline, you are renting rather than owning. That is not automatically wrong, but the price should reflect it and you should know before you sign anything.

What is it built on, and why that?

You do not need to understand the answer in any detail. You need to hear that there is a reason behind it.

"WordPress, because it is what I know well and it suits a site this size" is a perfectly good answer. "WordPress with about twenty plugins" is a maintenance bill you have not been told about yet. "I don't really know, my developer handles that side" from the person you are actually paying is a problem.

Follow it up by asking what happens when the platform needs updating, and specifically who does that and whether it is included.

Can I see three sites you built that are still live?

Not the portfolio page. Three real addresses, ideally at least a year old, that you can open on your own phone while you are sitting there.

Then do two things with them. Load them on mobile data rather than wifi and count the seconds. And look for signs of life since launch: opening hours that are still right, a news page that does not stop abruptly in 2023. A designer whose older sites have all gone stale is telling you something useful about what happens after the invoice is paid.

What do you need from me, and when?

The honest answer is: more than you expect, and earlier than you want. Text, photographs, logo files in the right formats, and a series of decisions you would rather somebody else made.

A designer who says "nothing much, leave it with me" is either going to fill your site with placeholder waffle or come back in week six asking for all of it at once. The good ones hand you a list on day one and then chase you for it.

When will it be finished, and what usually makes projects late?

Ask for a timeline, then ask what normally delays things. Anybody honest gives the same answer: content. Websites do not run late because designers are slow, they run late because the photographs never arrived.

What you want is somebody who tells you that at the start and builds the schedule around it, rather than promising four weeks and then quietly blaming you in week nine.

What happens in year two when I want a change?

Ask for the actual number. An hourly rate, or included in the plan, or a minimum charge per job. Then picture wanting six small changes over a year and see how that feels.

This is where a cheap build becomes an expensive one, and it is the part almost nobody asks about while they are still excited about how the homepage looks.

The questions that matter less than people think

How many years they have been trading. Some of the worst sites I have looked at were built by people who have been doing this for twenty years and stopped learning around 2014.

Whether they are local. It helps, and obviously I would say that, but it matters far less than whether they answer the phone. A responsive designer two hundred miles away beats an unresponsive one in the next village.

Which design software they use, which is of no consequence to you whatsoever. And awards, which are frequently paid for and tell you nothing about whether your phone will ring.

How to read the answers

Two patterns are worth watching for once you have worked through all that.

The first is the answer that is technically true but built to close the conversation down. "Yes, you'll own everything" is not the same sentence as "the domain will be registered in your name and here is the account you will log into". Ask for the specific version of anything that sounds smooth.

The second is defensiveness. Reasonable people do not mind being asked who owns the domain. If a question about ownership or handover makes somebody prickly, you have learned considerably more from the reaction than you would have from the answer. Listen out too for whether they ever say "I don't know". Somebody with an instant confident answer to every question, including ones that genuinely depend on things they have not looked at yet, is performing rather than thinking.

What to get in writing

Whatever gets agreed over coffee, get the important parts into the quote or a short contract. Not a forty page document that neither of you reads. Half a page covering what is being built, what it costs, what is not included, who owns the domain and the content, what the ongoing fee covers, and what happens if either side wants to stop.

Most of the disputes I hear about in this trade would have been prevented by that half page. It doubles as a test, too. Anybody who resists writing it down is telling you something worth hearing.

What their questions tell you

The strongest signal is not in their answers at all. It is whether they ask you anything.

Somebody who takes a brief without asking who your customers are, how people find you at the moment, what kind of work you want more of and what you would rather stop doing altogether, is going to build you a brochure rather than something that earns its keep. The first meeting should feel more like being interviewed than being sold to.

If you are collecting quotes at the moment, use this list on us as well. Get in touch, ask all of it, and if our answers do not hold up against somebody else's, go with them. A website is a five year decision and it is worth one awkward hour at the start.

### What should a small business website cost in Buckinghamshire?
URL: https://www.haddstudio.co.uk/blog/what-should-a-small-business-website-cost
Published: 2026-07-24T23:03:30.537Z
Real numbers rather than "it depends". What the UK market charges in 2026, what we charge and why, what actually moves the price, and how to tell whether a quote is fair.

Every first conversation reaches this question within about ten minutes, and most web designers dodge it. They say it depends. It does depend, but that answer is useless to somebody trying to work out whether they can afford a website at all, so this post has actual numbers in it, including ours.

Fair warning before we start. Prices vary enormously, and anyone who quotes you a figure without first asking what the site needs to do is guessing. But there are honest ranges, and you can tell a great deal about a quote from where it sits in them.

What the market charges in 2026

Read a dozen UK pricing guides published this year and they broadly agree with each other. A freelancer will build a five to ten page brochure site for somewhere between £900 and £3,000. A small studio sits a little above that. A traditional agency starts around £3,000 and runs to £8,000 and well beyond, because you are also paying for account managers, project managers and an office in a city.

Below all that sits the do it yourself tier, where Squarespace or Wix costs you a monthly subscription and a weekend. Above it sits anything with bookings, payments, logins or stock, which starts around £4,000 and has no real ceiling.

The running costs are more consistent than the build costs. A domain is £10 to £20 a year. Hosting runs from about £30 a year at the cheap end to well over £150. Maintenance plans usually land between £30 and £100 a month, depending entirely on what is in them.

What we charge

Our introductory prices start at £650, and most full projects start from around £2,000. A monthly plan covers hosting, security, technical updates, content edits and ongoing local SEO for the areas you serve. The same figures are on our FAQs page, because I would rather you knew before you reach out.

We are deliberately not the cheapest and nowhere near the most expensive. The £650 end suits a business that needs one good page and a way to be found, built properly rather than dropped onto a template. Two thousand and up is a proper multi page site with an editor you can use and structured local SEO for your towns.

You get a written quote before any work starts, and the price we agree is the price you pay. I mention that because variable pricing is the single most common complaint I hear about previous developers, usually arriving as a bill for something the client was certain had been included.

What actually moves the price

Not the number of pages, which is what almost everyone asks about first. Ten pages of similar content is barely more work than five. These are the things that genuinely change a quote:

Content. If your words and photos are ready, the project moves fast. If we are writing the copy and arranging a photographer, that is real time and it goes on the invoice.

Functionality. A contact form is nothing. Online booking, card payments, customer logins or stock control are each a project in their own right.

How many decisions you want to make. A client who says "you choose, here are three sites I like" costs less than one who wants to see five versions of a button.

Integrations. Connecting to a booking system, an accounts package or a supplier feed is where budgets quietly disappear.

How many towns you serve. Doing local SEO properly for Aylesbury, Thame and Princes Risborough is three times the content of doing it for one.

Design itself is rarely the expensive part. Deciding what the site should say usually is.

What about doing it yourself?

Worth taking seriously, and I say that as somebody who loses work to it. If you are starting out, have more time than money, and the business is simple, a Squarespace site you build yourself beats no site, and comfortably beats a bad site you paid for.

The catch is the one that catches everybody. One weekend becomes four, and the fourth is spent on something that is not your actual business. Work out what your own hours are worth before you decide it is free. Also remember the subscription never stops: five years at £20 a month is £1,200 for something you built yourself.

My rule of thumb is this. Build it yourself if the alternative is a very cheap agency build. Pay somebody if the website is going to be the main way customers find you.

What cheap actually costs

I am not sniffy about cheap websites. A sole trader with £400 to spend should spend the £400 rather than wait two years to afford something better.

Just be clear about what you are buying. At the bottom of the market you generally get a purchased template with your logo dropped on it, no way to edit it yourself, hosting shared with several hundred other sites, and a developer whose margin depends on never speaking to you again. It works perfectly on launch day and then slowly stops being true.

The real bill lands about two years later, when you want a new page, nobody answers the email, and you discover the domain was registered in the developer's name rather than yours. Then you pay again, and the second build costs more than the first because somebody has to untangle the first one before they can start.

The monthly fee, and what to watch for

Most decent studios now sell a monthly plan alongside the build, and there is a good reason for it. A website is not something you buy once and put on a shelf. It needs hosting, security attention, occasional content changes and somebody watching how it performs.

What matters is what the plan contains. Ask specifically: is hosting in there, how many content edits do I get, does it cover my Google Business Profile, and what happens if I cancel. That last question is the important one. If cancelling means the site goes dark, you are renting rather than owning, and the price should reflect that.

Three tests for whether a quote is fair

None of these require you to understand any of the technology.

Does the quote say what happens after launch? A quote that stops at "website: £2,400" is quietly leaving out the part that costs you money later.

Does it name what is not included? Honest quotes have exclusions written down. Quotes with no exclusions turn into arguments in month three.

And ask what happens when you want to change your own phone number. If the answer involves emailing anybody, add up the cost of every small change for the next five years, because there will be dozens of them.

Where the money actually goes

Worth knowing what you are buying, because "a website" sounds like one thing and is really about six.

On a typical two thousand pound build, the largest single block of time is not design and it is not code. It is the back and forth: working out what the business actually does, what each page should say, and which of the four things you sell people want to hear about first. That is usually about a third of the project, and it is the third clients least expect to pay for.

Then the build, which goes faster than people expect once the decisions are made. Then the content work: loading everything in, sizing photographs properly, writing page titles and descriptions that are not just the business name repeated. Then testing, which means checking it on real phones rather than by shrinking a browser window and hoping.

The part nobody itemises, and the part that separates a site that works from one that merely exists, is the last ten percent. Checking the contact form genuinely arrives in an inbox somebody reads. Making sure the phone number dials with one tap. Setting up redirects so every page of the old site lands somewhere sensible instead of turning into a dead end that Google remembers for years.

The question behind the question

When people ask what a website costs, what they usually mean is: am I about to be ripped off, and will this bring me any actual work?

On the first, the ranges above are your defence. Anything well outside them deserves an explanation, in either direction. On the second, a website on its own rarely brings in work. A website plus a claimed Google Business Profile plus a handful of genuine reviews does, which is why the first month checklist puts the profile before the website. Any designer talking about the site in isolation is only doing part of the job.

If you want a straight answer for your own situation, get in touch. You will get a written quote, and if you would be better off spending the money somewhere else entirely, we will say so. That happens more often than you might expect.

### llms.txt for small businesses: what it is and whether it does anything
URL: https://www.haddstudio.co.uk/blog/llms-txt-for-small-businesses
Published: 2026-07-24T23:01:11.892Z
We publish one, and I still think most of what is written about llms.txt is nonsense. What it is, who is actually reading it as of 2026, and where the real leverage is.

Every so often a new file appears that is going to change how the web works, and within a fortnight somebody is selling it to small businesses as a package. The current one is llms.txt.

We publish one on this site. I also think most of what is written about it is nonsense, which makes for an awkward position to defend, so here is the honest version: what it is, who is genuinely reading it, and whether you should care.

What llms.txt actually is

Jeremy Howard of Answer.AI proposed it in September 2024. The reasoning is sound. Language models have limited room for context, and turning a modern web page into useful text means stripping out navigation, adverts, cookie banners and JavaScript, which is both slow and error prone.

So you publish a file at yoursite.co.uk/llms.txt holding a clean, plain summary of your site in markdown, with links to the pages that matter. A machine trying to understand your business reads that instead of wading through your HTML. The shape of the idea is borrowed from robots.txt, which has worked for about thirty years.

Who is actually reading it

This is the part the people selling llms.txt packages tend to move past quickly.

As of early 2026, no major AI company has publicly committed to reading llms.txt in production. Not OpenAI, not Google, not Meta, not Mistral. Anthropic has been the most positive about it, and Perplexity has said it fetches the file to help decide which pages to prioritise, but that is a long way from the claim that AI search reads your llms.txt.

Google has been openly dismissive. Gary Illyes said in 2025 that Google does not support it and has no plans to, and John Mueller compared it publicly to the old keywords meta tag, which is roughly as cutting as search engineers get. OpenAI's own documentation points people at robots.txt for crawler control instead.

The server logs match the rhetoric. Sites that have published one report GPTBot fetching it occasionally, and most of the other crawlers essentially never touching it.

Adoption on the publishing side is real but lopsided. One study of 300,000 domains found roughly one in ten had a file, and those cluster heavily in software documentation, AI tooling and open source projects rather than among plumbers in Buckinghamshire.

llms.txt, robots.txt and ai.txt are not the same thing

Three files get mentioned in the same breath and they do completely different jobs, which causes real damage.

robots.txt tells crawlers what they may and may not fetch. It is decades old, honoured by every company that matters, and it is where you control whether AI companies can crawl your site at all. If you only touch one file, touch this one.

llms.txt runs in the opposite direction. It restricts nothing. It offers a tidy summary to anybody who wants one. ai.txt is a third proposal in the same territory with even less traction, and I would not spend an afternoon on it.

Somebody who believes their llms.txt is stopping AI companies using their content has protected precisely nothing, and that misunderstanding is common enough to be worth spelling out.

So why do we publish one

Four reasons, none of them dramatic.

It costs almost nothing. Ours generates itself from the same content that builds the website, so it took an afternoon once and then maintains itself. If it were a file somebody had to remember to update by hand, I would not bother.

It is useful to humans. Ours is a readable plain text version of the entire site, and I have used it myself to check whether a change actually went live.

The cost of being wrong is lopsided. If the idea gets adopted properly in two years, we already have one. If it never does, we lost an afternoon.

And writing one forces you to answer a question worth answering. If you had to describe your business in plain text, with no photographs and no design to hide behind, what would you actually say? More than one client has improved their homepage after seeing what their site sounds like with the pictures stripped out.

None of which means the idea is bad. Standards take years, and robots.txt itself spent a long stretch as a proposal nobody was obliged to honour. It means the honest status today is promising and largely unread, which is a very different sentence from the one in most of the marketing.

What actually goes in one

The format is deliberately plain. A heading with your business name, a short summary of what you do, some optional detail, then lists of links each with a single line explaining what is behind them.

For a small business that means: who you are and where you are, your main services, opening hours and contact details, links to the pages that matter, and anything you would want a machine to get right rather than infer. A restaurant would put the menu in it. A tradesman would put the areas covered and the fact that quotes are free.

The specification also allows an optional section for material that can be skipped when space is tight, which matters far more for a documentation site than for a plumber with nine pages.

The wider point about writing for machines

There is a real shift underneath all the llms.txt noise, even if the file itself turns out to be a footnote.

For twenty years the job was to write for people and let search engines take a copy. Increasingly a machine reads your website, decides what your business is, and repeats a summary of it to somebody who never visits you at all. You do not get to review that summary before it goes out. It is assembled from whatever your site makes easy to understand.

That is a strong argument for plain, specific writing, for putting facts in text rather than burying them in images, and for saying what you actually do instead of describing yourself as a leading provider of bespoke solutions. All of which helped before any of this and helps rather more now.

It is not an argument for buying a new file every time somebody publishes a proposal.

What actually helps AI assistants find you

If the goal is being recommended when somebody asks an assistant for a plumber in Aylesbury, llms.txt is not where the leverage sits. These are:

Structured data on your pages, so a machine knows your opening hours are opening hours rather than a sentence that happens to mention Tuesday.

Clean HTML with real text in it. If your prices live inside an image, no assistant can quote them to anybody.

Consistency across the web. Your name, address and phone number matching everywhere they appear, down to the punctuation.

Reviews and mentions on sites the models already trust, which for a local business mostly means Google.

Content that answers the questions people actually ask, phrased the way they ask them.

Boring, all of it. Also the part that works.

How ours is built

For anyone technical, the site runs on Next.js with Sanity as the CMS. There is a route at /llms.txt that runs a GROQ query pulling the editorial content out of the CMS and renders it as plain text. When somebody edits a page in Sanity, the file changes with it. There is no separate document to maintain and no way for the two to drift apart, which was the whole point.

The trap worth avoiding is writing one by hand. A stale llms.txt is worse than none at all, because you have published a confident, machine readable description of a business that has since changed its prices and dropped half its services.

What I would tell you to do

If your site sits on something that can generate the file automatically, publish one. It is cheap and it might matter later.

If it means paying somebody to write and then maintain a file by hand, do not. Spend that money on reviews, on decent photographs, or on making your existing pages load faster on a phone.

And if somebody sells you an llms.txt package as the route into AI search results, ask them which AI companies have committed to reading it in production. The honest answer, as things stand, is none of the large ones.

We build this into every site we make, mostly because doing it properly costs us nothing. If you want to see ours, it is right here. If you want an opinion on whether any of this is worth your attention, get in touch and I will tell you what I would do in your position.

### Why your Aylesbury business isn't showing up on Google Maps
URL: https://www.haddstudio.co.uk/blog/why-your-business-isnt-showing-up-on-google-maps
Published: 2026-07-24T22:59:15.665Z
You search your own trade and your own town, and you are not in the map box. Here is how I work through it, in the order I check, and which fixes are worth your time.

You search for your own trade and your own town. Plumber Aylesbury. Hairdresser Thame. Electrician Haddenham. Three businesses appear in the little map box at the top, and you are not one of them. One of them is somebody you know for a fact is not as good as you are.

This is the thing people bring to us most often, and it is almost never one big problem. It is usually two or three small ones stacked on top of each other, most of which you can fix yourself in an afternoon. Here is how I work through it, in the order I check.

First, make sure you are not searching wrong

Google personalises results heavily. Searching for your own business while sitting in your own kitchen, logged into your own account, tells you very little, because Google knows exactly who you are and precisely where you are standing.

Check it properly instead. Open a private window, and if you can, try it from a different part of town. What matters is whether somebody standing in Aylesbury town centre can find you, not whether you can find yourself from your own sofa. There are tools that simulate searching from a given postcode, but a private window and a walk to the shops covers most of it.

What Google is actually weighing

Google's published guidance says local results rank on relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance is how well your profile matches what somebody typed. Distance is how close you are to them. Prominence is how well known you appear to be across the rest of the web.

Distance you cannot change without moving premises. That leaves two, and both are far more fixable than most people assume.

The causes, roughly in the order I find them

Your profile exists but nobody ever claimed it. Google generates listings for businesses it knows about from other sources, and plenty of owners have never logged into theirs. If you have never verified, you are competing with one hand behind your back.

The primary category is wrong. This is the single biggest relevance lever and it is wrong surprisingly often. A business filed under Contractor rather than Electrician will lose to every properly categorised competitor indefinitely. Go and look at yours now. It takes two minutes and it is the highest value thing in this post.

The business name has keywords stuffed into it. If your profile is called something like Smith Plumbing Aylesbury Emergency 24hr, that breaks Google's rules, and automated enforcement got noticeably faster and more aggressive during 2026. It risks suspension rather than just underperformance. The name should match your signage, your invoices and your paperwork.

You have almost no reviews, or none since 2023. Reviews feed prominence directly, and a profile that has been quiet for two years reads as a business that might have closed. The people beating you have usually not done anything clever. They just ask everybody.

Your service area is set wrong. If you travel to customers rather than having a shop they visit, you should be set up as a service area business listing the places you genuinely cover. People either leave it blank or draw a fifty mile radius they have no intention of driving, and both of those hurt you.

The address is not eligible. PO boxes, rented mailboxes, coworking desks and offices that are not staffed during the hours you have published are all grounds for removal. If you work from home and would rather not publish your address, hide it and set a service area. Do not invent one.

Your details disagree with each other. If your phone number or address appears three different ways across your website, your Facebook page, a trade directory and an old listing somebody set up in 2019, that is a prominence problem. Pick one format and make everything match it, including the punctuation.

You have been suspended and have not noticed. This happens more than you would think, often after a burst of edits made in one sitting. A suspended profile simply vanishes from the map. If you went from visible to invisible more or less overnight, log in and look for a notice before you start optimising anything.

The proximity problem nobody can solve

Here is the uncomfortable part. If your workshop sits in a village six miles outside Aylesbury and somebody searches from the middle of town, you are at a structural disadvantage against a business on the high street. No amount of optimisation changes physical distance, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something.

What you can do is win the searches happening near you, get strong enough on relevance and prominence to overcome a few miles, and use your website to rank in the ordinary results underneath the map, where proximity counts for a good deal less.

Your website is part of this too

People treat the Google profile and the website as two separate projects. Google does not. Prominence is partly about what the rest of the web says about you, and your own site is the biggest single piece of that.

If your site does not say what you do and where you do it, in plain text a machine can read, you are asking Google to guess. If your address and phone number live inside an image, they may as well not exist. And if the thing takes eight seconds to load on a phone, that is a problem in the ordinary results even if the map box does not care.

The businesses that do well locally almost always have both halves working: a properly filled in profile, and a website that backs up every claim the profile makes.

What actually moves it

Fix the primary category, then add secondary categories that genuinely apply to work you actually do.

Ask every satisfied customer for a review, in person, on the day, while they are still pleased with you.

Reply to reviews. All of them, including the unfair ones, calmly and without arguing.

Add real photographs regularly. Your work, your van, your premises. Not stock images of somebody else's kitchen.

Fill in the services and products sections properly instead of leaving them empty, which is what most of your competitors have done.

Things that do not work, whatever you have been told

Buying reviews. Beyond the obvious problem with it, Google is reasonably good at spotting a cluster of five star reviews from accounts with no history, and the consequence lands on you rather than on whoever sold them to you.

Setting up extra listings for nearby towns. An invented address in Thame so that you appear in Thame searches is the quickest available route to losing the profile you already have.

Paying for a directory blitz. A few hundred low quality listings carrying slightly different versions of your details work against you, because inconsistency is the exact thing you are trying to eliminate.

Buying a tool that posts to your profile automatically every week. Google Posts are fine and mildly useful, but automated filler nobody reads is not the thing holding you back. Fix the category first.

And changing everything at once. Rewrite the description, swap the category, upload forty photographs and change the opening hours in the same afternoon and you will trip the automated review. Make changes gradually, and give each one a fortnight before you judge whether it did anything.

What to do this week

If you have one hour rather than one month: check the primary category, check the business name has no keywords bolted onto it, check the service area matches the places you actually go, and ask the next three customers for a review. That is the whole hour, and it will do more for you than everything else on this list combined.

How long it takes

Category and name corrections can show up within days. Review driven improvement takes months, because it depends on how quickly you can gather genuine reviews without collecting forty of them in one suspicious week.

Anyone promising you the top of the map pack by next Friday is either lying or about to do something that gets your profile suspended. Local search rewards patience and consistency, which is annoying but does at least mean the businesses that stick at it tend to stay ahead.

If you are in Aylesbury, Thame or the villages around Haddenham and cannot work out why you are invisible, get in touch. Our free health check covers the Google side as well as the website. Fairly often the fix is something you can do yourself in an afternoon, in which case we will simply tell you what it is and let you get on with it.

### One page per town: local SEO when you cover Aylesbury, Thame and everywhere between
URL: https://www.haddstudio.co.uk/blog/local-seo-multiple-towns-location-pages
Published: 2026-07-24T22:55:00.306Z
Location pages work, but the shortcut version of them is one of the oldest ways to damage a website. The test I use to tell the difference, and how many pages you actually need.

If you cover Aylesbury, Thame, Princes Risborough and half the villages in between, you will eventually ask the obvious question. How do I show up in all of them?

The answer is one page per town, done properly. The trouble is that the shortcut version of that idea is one of the oldest ways to damage a website, and most of the people selling it to you will not mention that part.

The shortcut, and why it backfires

The tempting version goes like this. Build one services page, write it once, then swap the town name in and out. Either automatically, based on what somebody searched for, or by duplicating the page forty times and running find and replace over it.

Google has a name for what you end up with. Doorway pages: pages built to catch searches rather than to help anybody, funnelling everyone into the same destination. They sit in Google's spam policies today, they have been targeted since a specific update in 2015, and detection now runs through the same automated systems that handle everything else Google considers spam.

The consequence is rarely dramatic. Occasionally you get a manual action and the pages vanish. Far more often they simply never rank, and you spend a year wondering why the forty pages you paid for did nothing at all.

Visitors clock it too. Land on a page announcing "the leading plumber in Chinnor" that contains nothing whatsoever about Chinnor, and you can tell in about four seconds that nobody involved has ever been to Chinnor.

The test that separates a real page from a doorway

Could this page exist for a different town if you changed only the town name? If yes, it is a doorway. If no, it is a real page. That is the whole test, and it is more useful than any checklist.

The things that make a page pass it:

Actual jobs you have done there, with photographs. A boiler on a named street, a shopfront on a particular parade.

Reviews from customers in that town, quoted with their names on.

Things only somebody local would know. Which estates went up in the seventies and share the same wiring problem, where the parking is impossible on market day, which end of town floods.

Practical detail that genuinely differs by place. How far it is from you, whether there is a call out charge for that distance, which days you are usually over that way anyway.

Who you work with there. The merchants you use, the other trades you would recommend, the suppliers who deliver.

If you cannot write three hundred words about a town that you could not write about the next one along, you probably should not have a page for it yet.

How many pages is too many

A page each for Aylesbury, Thame and Princes Risborough, plus wherever you are based, is sensible if you genuinely work in all four. Forty pages covering every village in the Vale is not, and it is the most common way this goes wrong.

Start with the towns where you already have customers and photographs. Add one when you have earned it, which means when you have done enough work there to write about it honestly. Three strong pages beat thirty thin ones every time, and they cost less to build.

The content problem, honestly

The reason most businesses end up with doorway pages is not dishonesty. It is that writing four genuinely different pages about the same service is hard work, and nobody has a spare fortnight.

If that is where you are, the answer is fewer pages rather than faker ones. A single page saying "we cover Aylesbury, Thame and Princes Risborough" with real detail about all three will outperform four thin pages, and it takes an evening instead of a month.

What goes on the page, roughly in order

A heading that names the town and the service in plain words. A first paragraph that proves you know the place. Two or three specific jobs with photographs. A review from somebody who lives there. The practical detail: what you cover, how far you travel, how quickly you can usually get there. Then how to contact you, with the phone number as text rather than sitting inside an image.

Resist the urge to repeat the town name fifteen times. Google worked out keyword density a very long time ago, and the only person it impresses now is whoever sold you the page.

Where the pages should sit

Give each one a sensible address. Something like /electrician-thame or /areas/aylesbury, rather than a query string or a page buried four levels down. Link to them from your navigation or from an areas we cover page, so they are not orphans that only Google ever stumbles across.

Each page has to stand on its own. Somebody arriving cold from a search should be able to work out what you do, that you cover their town, roughly what it costs and how to ring you, without clicking anywhere else.

The boring bits that still matter

Put your address and phone number on every location page as text, and make them match your Google Business Profile exactly, punctuation included. Write the page title for a human: "Electrician in Thame | Smith Electrical" rather than a string of repeated keywords.

And check the pages actually load quickly. A location page that takes six seconds on a phone in a village with one bar of signal will not convert anybody, however well it is written.

A worked example

Say you are an electrician based in Haddenham. Most of your work is there, a decent amount is in Thame, and you pick up the occasional job in Aylesbury.

The Haddenham page more or less writes itself, because you know the place. A lot of older properties, several of which still have rewiring jobs waiting to happen. You know which parts of the village have supply problems. You can name the streets you have worked on this year and put up photographs from four of them.

The Thame page is thinner but honest. Six jobs this year, two photographs, one customer happy to be quoted by name, and the practical detail that you are over that way most Tuesdays anyway, so there is no extra charge for the journey.

Aylesbury does not get a page yet. Three jobs, no photographs, nothing you could say about it that would not apply equally to anywhere else. So you mention Aylesbury on your home page, take pictures on the next job you do there, and write the page in six months once you have earned it.

That is the whole method. It is slower than buying forty pages from somebody, and it is the version that works.

What to do with the pages you already have

If somebody has already built you thirty location pages, do not panic and delete them all on a Sunday evening.

Work out which ones actually receive visitors. Keep the handful that do and put real content into them. For the rest, either fold them into a single areas we cover page and redirect the old addresses to it, or improve them one at a time as you gather the material. Redirect rather than delete, so that any links pointing at them are not thrown away.

The destination is fewer pages that each deserve to exist, arrived at gradually. Nobody has ever regretted having three good pages instead of thirty thin ones, and the tidying up is easier to do over a few months than in one weekend of panic.

What this will not fix

Location pages help you in the ordinary blue link results. They will not put you in the map box at the top for a town you are not physically in. Those two things run on different logic, and the map weighs distance heavily.

This confuses people, so it is worth being blunt about. You can hold the top organic result for "electrician Thame" while a Thame based competitor sits above you in the map. Both are worth having. A location page only buys you one of them.

The order I would do it in

Write the page for the town you are actually in first, and get it genuinely good. Then the town where you do your second most work. Then stop, and watch what those two pages do over three months before building any more.

Take photographs as you go. Every job in a new town is content for a page you will write later, and the photographs are the piece nobody ever has when the time comes to write it.

If you cover several towns and want an honest opinion on whether your current pages are helping or quietly holding you back, get in touch. It is one of the quicker things to diagnose, and the answer is usually visible within about ten minutes of looking.

### Why we build small business websites on Sanity instead of WordPress
URL: https://www.haddstudio.co.uk/blog/sanity-cms-vs-wordpress-for-small-business-websites
Published: 2026-07-24T22:45:04.261Z
WordPress runs about 41 percent of the web. We build on Sanity and Next.js instead. The long version of why, including the cases where WordPress is still the better answer.

As of mid 2026, WordPress runs about 41 percent of all websites, which is roughly 60 percent of every site built on a recognised content management system. Those are W3Techs figures and they have barely moved in years. When a small business asks for a website, WordPress is the default answer almost everywhere, and it was our default too until we sat down and worked out what we were signing clients up to for the following five years.

We build on Sanity and Next.js instead. This is the long version of why, including the parts where WordPress is still the better choice, because there are some.

What headless actually means, without the jargon

A traditional CMS does two jobs in one application. It stores your content, and it builds the pages your customers see. WordPress works this way by default. Someone visits your site, WordPress wakes up, queries a database, runs whatever plugins are installed, assembles a page in PHP and sends it down the wire.

A headless CMS only does the first job. Sanity stores your content and hands it out through an API. Something else, in our case Next.js, turns that content into pages. The tool you edit in and the website your customers load are two separate things that talk to each other.

The practical consequence for a business owner is simple enough. The thing your customers load is not the thing you log into. Your website cannot be slowed down by the editor, and the editor cannot be broken by the website.

The maintenance problem nobody mentions in the sales pitch

This is the part that settled the decision for us. Patchstack, which tracks security issues across the WordPress ecosystem, recorded 11,334 new vulnerabilities in 2025, a 42 percent increase on the year before. 91 percent of them were in plugins and 9 percent in themes. WordPress core itself had six, and all of them were rated low priority.

The pattern is consistent year on year. WordPress itself is well maintained software. The extensions bolted onto it are where the trouble lives, and every small business WordPress site I have opened up has had at least a dozen of them installed, usually without the owner knowing what half of them do.

Two more numbers from the same report. 46 percent of those vulnerabilities had no fix available from the plugin developer at the point they were made public. And for the vulnerabilities that get attacked hardest, the weighted median time between public disclosure and the first exploitation attempt was five hours.

Which makes the standard advice, keep your plugins updated, necessary but nowhere near sufficient. You cannot patch inside five hours while you are on a job in Princes Risborough, and in almost half of cases there is nothing to patch with. Patchstack also ran penetration tests against a group of hosting providers and found their combined defences blocked 26 percent of vulnerability attacks. Good hosting helps. It does not solve this.

On a Sanity and Next.js build there is no PHP application sitting on a server you are responsible for, and no plugin ecosystem running code on it. Your content lives in Sanity's infrastructure and your pages are built ahead of time and served from a CDN. I am not going to claim it cannot be attacked, because that would be nonsense. The attack surface is smaller by a large margin, and the difference shows up in what a client has to think about on a Sunday night.

Structured content, and why it matters when you own the business

This is the less obvious advantage, and the one clients tend to notice after six months rather than on day one.

In a typical WordPress page, everything is one long blob of formatted text. Your opening hours are a sentence inside that blob. Your prices are a table someone pasted in from Word in 2019. If you want the opening hours to appear on the contact page, in the footer, and in the structured data that search engines read, somebody types them three times. Three times is where mistakes come from, and it is why so many local businesses have a website quietly advertising last year's Christmas hours.

In Sanity you define the shape of your content up front. Opening hours are a field. A price is a number attached to a service. A location has a name, an address and a set of hours. You edit it once and it changes everywhere it appears, including the machine readable markup underneath.

That last part matters more than it did two years ago. When someone asks ChatGPT or Google's AI results for a recommendation, the answer is assembled from whatever those systems can parse about you. Structured content is easier for them to read correctly than a blob of HTML with your phone number buried in the middle of a paragraph. We also publish a plain text version of the whole site at /llms.txt, though I would not oversell that one. No major AI company has committed to reading those files yet, and we treat it as cheap insurance rather than a trick.

There is a second benefit that sounds abstract until it happens to you. Because your content sits in a database rather than being welded to a theme, redesigning the site does not mean rebuilding the content. We can throw away the entire front end and your words come across untouched. Anyone who has been through a WordPress theme migration and spent a fortnight untangling shortcodes knows what the alternative feels like.

Speed, and why it is not a vanity metric

Google publishes the thresholds it uses. Under Core Web Vitals, the main content of a page should render within 2.5 seconds, the page should respond to a tap within 200 milliseconds, and the layout should not shift about while it loads. These are measured on real visits from real people, and you need three quarters of them to pass.

A WordPress site can hit those numbers. Plenty do, with decent hosting and disciplined plugin use. But you are working against the architecture rather than with it, because every request still means PHP, a database query and whatever plugins have hooked themselves into the process. The entire caching plugin industry exists to paper over that one fact.

With Next.js the pages are built in advance and served from a CDN close to the visitor, so they are already fast before anyone starts optimising anything. On a phone with two bars of signal outside a village hall, that gap is the difference between a call and a bounce.

Where WordPress is still the right answer

There are situations where I would tell you to use it, and I would rather say so myself than have somebody else say it for me.

If you need a full shop with complicated stock, subscriptions or booking rules, WooCommerce and its ecosystem will get you there faster and cheaper than a custom build. If you are the sort of person who enjoys installing things and tinkering on a Sunday, WordPress is built for that and Sanity is not. And if your entire budget is a few hundred pounds, WordPress on shared hosting with a bought theme is the only honest answer anyone can give you.

There is also a practical point about people. There are WordPress developers in every town in Buckinghamshire. There are fewer who work with Sanity and Next.js. If you fell out with us tomorrow, replacing us would take longer than replacing a WordPress developer. We deal with that by keeping the content model documented and the code standard rather than clever, so anyone competent can pick it up, but it is a real consideration and you should weigh it rather than take my word that it does not matter.

And a badly built Sanity site is worse than a well built WordPress one. The stack is not what makes a website good. It changes which things are easy, which are hard, and what you have to worry about in year three.

What this means for a small business, stripped of the technical detail

You log into an editor that shows your content and nothing else. No dashboard full of plugin notifications, licence renewals and upgrade prompts.

Nothing needs updating on your side, so there are no security patches for you to miss while you are busy running the business.

The site loads quickly on a phone on a bad connection, which around here is most of the time.

Your content is yours in a portable form. If you ever leave us you leave with a structured export, not a database dump that only the next developer can open.

Running costs are low. Sanity has a free tier that a typical small business site does not outgrow, and serving a static site costs very little.

What you give up is the ability to install a plugin yourself on a Sunday evening. In my experience that is the thing that breaks small business websites in the first place, so I am comfortable with the trade.

How we actually set it up

The short version, for anyone technical who has read this far. Content is modelled in Sanity as documents plus reusable sections, queried with GROQ, and rendered by Next.js server components. Editors assemble a page from an ordered list of sections, so adding a new page does not need a developer. Every section carries an optional anchor id, which means a link can point at a specific part of a page rather than the top of it. The sitemap and the robots rules are generated from the CMS rather than hard coded, and there is a /llms.txt endpoint that gives AI crawlers a plain text version of the site.

We built our own site this way, which is the only honest way to sell it. If you want to see what editing actually feels like, we will show you the real editor rather than a screenshot of one.

If you have a WordPress site that has turned into a maintenance problem, or you are choosing a platform for the first time and would rather not choose wrong, get in touch. We do a free health check covering speed, mobile behaviour and how you show up in search, and we will tell you plainly whether a rebuild is worth the money or whether you would be better off spending it somewhere else.

### Starting a business in Buckinghamshire: what to sort online in your first month
URL: https://www.haddstudio.co.uk/blog/starting-a-business-in-buckinghamshire-online-checklist
Published: 2026-07-24T22:00:00.000Z
Company registration, your Google Business Profile, the name, the domain, and the website. A practical order of play for anyone starting up around Haddenham, Aylesbury or Thame.

If you are starting a business in Haddenham, Thame, Aylesbury or one of the villages in between, the online side usually gets left until last. Company first, van and cards next, website when things settle down. I understand the logic. It is also the order that costs you the most, because the three months you spend settling down are three months of people searching for exactly what you sell and finding someone else instead.

This is roughly the order I would do it in. Some of it takes ten minutes. None of it needs a developer.

Sole trader or limited company

Worth deciding early, because it affects the name you can use, but do not let it hold up everything else. You can trade as a sole trader from tomorrow and incorporate later if the numbers start pointing that way.

Two things changed recently that catch people out. Registering a company online with Companies House went from £50 to £100 on 1 February 2026, and the annual confirmation statement is now £50 to file online. Since 18 November 2025, new directors and people with significant control also have to verify their identity. That adds a step to the process rather than a cost, but it does mean you cannot set a company up in five minutes on your phone any more.

I am not an accountant and none of this is tax advice. Most accountants around Aylesbury and Thame will give you half an hour free to talk through which structure suits you. That half hour is usually worth more than an evening of reading forum threads written by people in different countries with different tax systems.

Check the name in three places before you commit to it

The Companies House register, domain availability, and a plain Google search. Do all three in one sitting, before anything gets printed.

The Google search is the one people tend to skip. If a firm with a nearly identical name has been trading in Aylesbury for fifteen years, you will spend the next three years fighting them for your own name in search results, and you will lose, because they have a fifteen year head start on reviews, links and mentions. Better to find that out now than after the van is wrapped.

For a local business I would take the .co.uk over the .com almost every time. Customers here expect it, it is cheaper, and it quietly says you are British and probably nearby. Avoid long hyphenated domains. If you have to spell it out twice over the phone, it is the wrong domain.

Claim your Google Business Profile before you build anything else

It is free, it takes about twenty minutes, and for a lot of local businesses it brings in more work in year one than the website does. If you only do one thing on this list, do this one.

Google's own guidance says local results are ranked on three things: relevance, distance and prominence. Distance is fixed, so ignore it. Relevance is how well your profile matches what someone typed, and that comes mostly from your categories and your description. Prominence is how well known you appear to be, which comes largely from reviews, mentions and links.

Four things that make a real difference:

Your primary category does most of the work. Electrician and electrical installation service are not the same search, and picking the wrong one quietly costs you months.

If you travel to customers rather than having premises they visit, set the profile up as a service area business and list the villages you actually cover, not a fifty mile radius you have no intention of driving.

Ask your first ten customers for a review on the day, while they are still pleased with you. A profile with fourteen honest reviews beats an empty profile with a nicer logo every time.

Upload photographs of your own work rather than stock images. Google shows them prominently and people genuinely look at them before they call.

One warning. Do not stuff the business name field with keywords. Dave Smith Plumbing Aylesbury Emergency 24hr breaks Google's guidelines, and the people it hurts most are the competitors down the road who will happily report it.

Use an email address on your own domain

A small one that punches above its weight. A Gmail address and an address on your own domain cost roughly the same to run. One of them looks like a business. If you have bought the domain anyway, the email comes with it and takes about half an hour to set up. It also means that if you ever change email provider you keep the address, which is not true when your entire customer history lives in a free account tied to somebody else's brand.

Where people around here actually look

Search is not the whole picture in a place like this. A fair amount of local trade still moves through Facebook groups. Haddenham, Long Crendon, Chinnor, Princes Risborough and most of the surrounding villages have active ones, and a recommendation in a village group carries weight that no advert will match. Join them as yourself, be useful when someone asks a question you can answer, and do not post about your own business every week.

Two other things worth an hour of your time. Buckinghamshire Business First runs the county's growth hub. Membership is free if you are based in Buckinghamshire, and it offers growth grants in the £1,000 to £5,000 range along with hot desks, meeting rooms and events. And Thame's charter market has been running on the same site on a Tuesday since the thirteenth century. If you sell anything you can put on a table, a stall there is cheap market research with real customers who will tell you exactly what they think.

Networking groups are more mixed. Some people build entire businesses on them. Others burn eighteen months of Thursday mornings and a lot of subscription money. Go along twice as a visitor before you pay for anything.

The website: small, honest, and yours to edit

A new business does not need ten pages. It needs to answer four questions: what you do, where you do it, why anyone should believe you, and how to get hold of you. Put the phone number in the page as text rather than inside an image, so a phone can dial it with one tap.

The thing that separates a website that keeps working from one that quietly dies is whether you can change it yourself. Prices go up. Opening hours change. You take on a new service, or drop one you have grown to hate. If every one of those changes means emailing someone and waiting three days, you will stop bothering, and within a year your website will be telling customers things that are no longer true.

Speed matters more than most people expect, and Google is unusually open about how it measures it. Its Core Web Vitals thresholds are that the main content should appear within 2.5 seconds, the page should respond to a tap within 200 milliseconds, and the layout should not jump about while it loads. Those are measured on real visits, and you need three quarters of them to pass. A slow site loses people before they ever reach your prices.

One more thing, and it is the mistake I see most often around here. If you serve Aylesbury, Thame and Princes Risborough, give each town its own page with real content about that area. Do not build a single page that swaps the town name in and out. Google worked that trick out years ago, and visitors can smell it too.

If you take a unit or a workshop

Business rates are the surprise cost for anyone moving out of a spare room. Small business rate relief means a property with a rateable value of £12,000 or less currently pays nothing, with relief tapering away to zero as the rateable value approaches £15,000. Every rateable value in England was reassessed with effect from 1 April 2026, so anything you read that predates that may be out of date, including this. Check your specific address with Buckinghamshire Council rather than trusting a number from a blog.

Working from home is usually fine, though it depends on how much of the house you use for the business and whether customers come to you. If you are converting the garage into a salon, ask the council first.

What I would leave until later

Spending three weeks on a logo. Printed brochures. Setting up profiles on five social platforms you will not keep up with. A blog, unless you actually enjoy writing.

In month one, a claimed Google profile, one honest page that loads fast, and ten real reviews will beat all of that put together. The rest can wait until you know which parts of the business people actually want to buy, which is almost never the part you expected when you started.

If you are setting something up around Haddenham, Aylesbury or Thame and want a second opinion on the website side before you spend money, get in touch. The first conversation is free, and I will tell you honestly if you do not need us yet. Our FAQs cover the question everyone asks first, which is what it costs.

### hadd. studio has launched: web design and development for local businesses in Buckinghamshire
URL: https://www.haddstudio.co.uk/blog/web-design-and-development-in-buckinghamshire
Published: 2026-07-20T22:45:00.000Z
hadd. studio is a new web design studio in Haddenham, building fast, editable websites for local businesses across Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. Here's what we do.

hadd. studio is a new web design studio based in Haddenham, Buckinghamshire. We build fast, modern websites for local businesses, and as of this week our own site is live. This first post is a short introduction: who's behind the studio, what we do, and why I think businesses around here deserve better websites than they're getting.

Why start a web studio in Haddenham?

Because I kept seeing the same thing. Good local businesses, the kind that get recommended in village Facebook groups and stay booked for weeks, with websites that were slow, broken on phones, or last updated years ago. Some paid a lot for those sites. Others got a cheap build from someone who vanished the moment the invoice cleared.

The options for a small business around here have been thin. Big agencies in London or Oxford charge more than most local firms can justify. The budget end hands you a template, and good luck getting the phone number changed later. There wasn't much in between, so that's the gap hadd. studio exists to fill.

What does hadd. studio actually do?

We design and build websites, and we look after them once they're live. That's it.

Every site we build loads quickly, works properly on phones, and comes with an editor so you can change your own prices, photos, and opening hours without paying anyone or waiting three days for a reply. We don't use WordPress. The sites are built on the same modern platform used by much bigger companies, which is a large part of why they're fast, and fast matters: people give up on slow pages, and Google notices.

If you already have a website that isn't pulling its weight, we offer a free health check. We'll look at its speed, how it behaves on a phone, and how you show up on Google, then tell you straight what state it's in. Our FAQs cover the common questions, including the one everyone asks first, which is what it costs.

Where do we work?

We're in Haddenham, so most of our clients are within about half an hour of us: Aylesbury, Thame, Princes Risborough, and the villages between them. We also work with businesses further out, towards Buckingham, High Wycombe, and Oxford. Distance isn't really the constraint, but we like being able to meet face to face over a coffee, and if you're anywhere in Buckinghamshire or Oxfordshire, that's easy to arrange.

There's something worth saying about local, too. A studio in the same town as you has skin in the game. Our clients bump into us at the shop. If a site we built is embarrassing, everyone we know hears about it. I find that focuses the mind in a way a support ticket queue never will.

What's next?

This blog will be practical, not promotional. Posts on what a website should cost, why some sites never show up on Google, what to ask a web designer before you hand over money. The things people ask us over coffee, written down.

If your business is anywhere near Aylesbury, Thame, or Haddenham and your website needs work (or you need one full stop), get in touch. The first chat costs nothing.

## Legal pages
### Privacy Policy
Last updated: 2026-07-20T21:00:00.000Z
Who we are

hadd. studio is the trading name of Stefan Bezzant, a sole trader based in Haddenham, Buckinghamshire. For the purposes of UK data protection law, Stefan Bezzant is the data controller for personal data collected through this website.

Address: 6 Carwithen Close, Haddenham, HP17 8NY, United Kingdom Email: stefan@haddstudio.co.uk

This policy explains what personal data we collect through haddstudio.co.uk, why we collect it, and what rights you have over it. If you become a client, we will give you further privacy information relevant to that work.

What we collect and why

When you contact us. If you get in touch through the contact form, by email, or by phone, we collect your name, contact details, and whatever you include in your message. We use this to reply to you, discuss your project, and follow up on your enquiry. Our lawful basis is legitimate interests: responding to people who contact us about our services.

If you become a client. We hold your contact details, correspondence, project information, and billing records so we can deliver the work and meet our accounting obligations. Our lawful bases are performance of a contract and, for financial records, legal obligation.

When you browse the site. We do not currently use analytics tools, so browsing the site does not collect personal data about you beyond the standard server logs needed to run and secure it. If we add analytics in future, we will ask for your consent first and update this policy. See the cookies section below.

We do not collect any special category data through this site, and the site is not aimed at children.

Cookies

The site does not currently set any analytics, advertising, or other optional cookies. The only cookies or similar technologies used are those strictly necessary for the site to work.

If we introduce analytics tools such as Google Analytics or Hotjar in future, we will ask for your consent through a cookie banner before they run, and we will update this policy to explain what they collect. You can also block cookies in your browser settings at any time.

Who we share your data with

We do not sell your data, and we do not share it with anyone for their own marketing. We use a small number of service providers to run the site and the business, and they process data on our behalf:

Vercel hosts the website.

Sanity stores the site's content.

Zoho handles our email, including messages sent through the contact form.

Calendly handles call bookings, including your name, email address, and chosen meeting time.

We may also share data where the law requires it, or with professional advisers such as an accountant where necessary.

Where your data goes

Some of the providers above store data outside the UK, including in the United States. Where that happens, the transfer is protected by safeguards recognised under UK law, such as the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework or the UK's International Data Transfer Agreement and Addendum.

How long we keep your data

Enquiries that do not lead to work: up to 12 months, then deleted.

Client records and correspondence: for the length of our engagement and up to 6 years afterwards, in line with limitation periods and tax rules.

How we protect your data

The site is served over HTTPS, and the services we use hold recognised security certifications. Access to enquiry and client data is limited to Stefan Bezzant.

Your rights

Under UK data protection law you have the right to:

access a copy of the personal data we hold about you;

ask us to correct data that is wrong or incomplete;

ask us to delete your data;

restrict or object to how we use your data;

receive your data in a portable format;

withdraw consent at any time, where consent is our lawful basis.

To use any of these rights, email stefan@haddstudio.co.uk. We will respond within one month. There is no fee unless a request is clearly unfounded or excessive.

Complaints

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, please contact us first at stefan@haddstudio.co.uk and we will try to put it right. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint, or by calling 0303 123 1113.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as the site or the law changes. The current version will always be published on this page.

### Terms & Conditions
Last updated: 2026-07-20T20:20:28.870Z
Who we are

This website, haddstudio.co.uk (the "site"), is operated by Stefan Bezzant, a sole trader trading as hadd. studio.

Address: 6 Carwithen Close, Haddenham, HP17 8NY, United Kingdom Email: stefan@haddstudio.co.uk

These terms cover your use of this website only. If you become a client, the work we do for you is covered by a separate written agreement.

Agreeing to these terms

By using this site you agree to these terms. If you do not agree with them, please do not use the site. We may update these terms from time to time, and the version published here is the one that applies. Check this page occasionally to see if anything has changed.

Using the site

You may browse the site and use its content for your own personal or business information. You must not:

use the site in any way that breaks the law;

try to gain unauthorised access to the site, the server it runs on, or any connected system;

introduce viruses or other harmful material;

copy, scrape, or republish content from the site for commercial purposes without our written permission.

Content on this site

The content on this site is provided for general information about hadd. studio and the services we offer. It is not professional advice. While we try to keep everything accurate and up to date, we make no promises that the content is complete, accurate, or current. Pricing shown on the site is indicative and does not form an offer. Any quote we give you for actual work will be confirmed in writing.

Intellectual property

Unless stated otherwise, we own or licence the content on this site, including the text, design, logo, graphics, and code. The hadd. studio name and logo must not be used without our written permission. Where the site shows work we have produced for clients, that work is shown with their permission and remains subject to the rights agreed with those clients.

Links to other websites

The site may link to other websites, including client sites and social media. We do not control those sites and are not responsible for their content or how they handle your data.

Availability

We aim to keep the site available and working properly, but we do not guarantee it. We may suspend, withdraw, or change the site at any time without notice.

Our responsibility to you

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits our liability where it would be unlawful to do so. That includes liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, and for fraud.

Beyond that, the site is provided free of charge for information purposes, and we are not liable for any loss or damage arising from your use of it, or from any reliance on its content. This includes loss of profit, business, or data. If you use the site for business purposes, you accept that we have no liability to you for business losses connected to the site.

Your data

Details of the personal data we collect through this site, and how we use it, are in our privacy policy.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction over any dispute connected to them.

Contact

Questions about these terms can be sent to stefan@haddstudio.co.uk.