Web design in Manchester.
Built to run something, not to sit there.
We are a Manchester software studio, and most of what we are asked for starts as a website and turns out to be a system: a booking diary, a trade portal, an ordering platform, an admin screen somebody uses every day. The city centre work we do is mostly that second kind, because the businesses here already have a website and what they are short of is the thing behind it.
Start a projectWhat a Manchester brief usually turns out to be
Across the enquiries we take from M1 to M4 and the inner suburbs, the website is rarely the problem. These are the four briefs underneath it.
A portal with real documents in it
Our published recruitment build, Clearbridge Talent, is the clearest example: a platform with AI-assisted CV screening where the CVs live in private storage and are reached only through signed links that expire. A CV is somebody’s address, phone number and work history. Any Manchester business handling applications, tenancies or claims has the same problem and usually has it sitting in a public bucket.
A diary that stops double bookings
City-centre services — clinics, studios, barbers, consultancies — fail on the overlap, the deposit and the no-show, in that order. A calendar that cannot double-book is a database constraint, not a plugin setting.
Ordering that is not renting the customer
Restaurants and bars in the centre carry the highest aggregator exposure of anywhere we work, because footfall is transient and the apps own the discovery. The arithmetic is published and it is worth doing before anybody builds anything.
An admin screen the owner can actually use
Most of the systems we inherit have no owner view at all: staff screens, and then a developer who has to be asked. We build the owner console as a first-class page, with its own password and a re-authentication step, because the business outlives the agency.
Sources, checked 26 October 2026
Why Manchester sites are slow, and what we do about it
The one measurable thing wrong with most Manchester agency sites, including ours before we fixed it, is that they are heavy. Google measures how fast the main content appears, and the threshold is published.
- The number that matters Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, measured on real visits, not on a desktop on office wi-fi.
- What breaks it Hero video, uncompressed photography, a font loaded from three places, and an analytics stack of four tags. We have had our own homepage at five seconds and it took real work to get it down.
- What we do Images sized and served in a modern format, video only where it earns its weight, fonts self-hosted, and the page rendered on the server so the first thing the browser receives is already the content.
Sources, checked 26 October 2026
Working with us in the city
We will come to you
Manchester is twenty minutes from us. For anything with hardware in it — a till, a printer, a kiosk, a card reader — we would rather be stood at the counter on the day than talk somebody through it on the phone.
We do not publish an address
That is deliberate and it is worth saying out loud rather than letting you wonder: we are a service-area business and the address on the companies register is not an office you can walk into. Meetings happen at your place or on video.
Fixed price, fixed timeline, in writing
Quoted within 48 hours of the scope being agreed. What that price is depends entirely on the build, which is why there is no price list on this site.
When we are the wrong firm for this
If what you want is a five-page brochure site for under a thousand pounds, we are the wrong call and we will say so on the first phone call. That work is real work and somebody should do it, but we build systems and our costs reflect that. The same goes for anything that needs a designer to sit with your brand for a month before a line of code is written: we design well enough to build, and there are Manchester studios who design far better than we do.
What we are good for is the bit after the pretty picture: the part with a database, a payment, a printer and somebody’s private data in it.
Before you ask.
Are you actually based in Manchester?
How long does a Manchester website take?
Do you only build websites?
Can you take over a site somebody else built?
- Bespoke web design →What a built site includes and what it does not.
- Clearbridge Talent →The Manchester recruitment platform, written up in full.
- Inherited a build →What we check first when we take over somebody else’s site.
- Manchester (apps) →iOS and Android apps built in Manchester, with the store costs and review rules on the table first.
- Bolton →Ordering platforms, tills and websites for Bolton businesses, from the studio that built Grillsters.
Ready to get started?
Tell us what you need. We will scope it, price it and build it.
Start a project →