A website designer covering Birmingham.
For West Midlands businesses that want a senior operator on the project — not a Birmingham studio with a project manager and a three-month timeline. James drives over from Derby. Phil drives over from Nottingham. £999 to build, £99 a month to look after.
One-off, all-in. Brief, design, build, copy assist, deploy. No discovery fee, no design-phase upcharge, no surprise add-on.
Hosting, monitoring, security, backups and every small content / copy / image change. No hourly billing on changes.
James from Derby and Phil from Nottingham are both an hour from central Birmingham. Half-day on-site briefs are the default for the West Midlands.
Brief usBirmingham has the agencies. It also has the agency prices.
Birmingham has more good web studios per square mile than most UK cities — Digbeth, Brindleyplace, Jewellery Quarter, Colmore Row. They’re good, and they price like it. A typical SMB quote sits between £4,000 and £15,000, with a three-month timeline and a project-manager layer in between the buyer and whoever’s actually writing the code. For a lot of West Midlands businesses, that’s the wrong shape: you want the result, you don’t want the studio relationship and the studio bill.
Moonlabs is the third option. James drives over from Derby. Phil drives over from Nottingham. One senior operator runs the whole project from brief to launch — on the same Laravel + Tailwind stack we run on Homemove, home.co.uk and homedata.co.uk. £999 to build, £99 a month to look after. The face on the day of your brief is the face who builds the site. There’s no studio between you and the work.
Six things a Birmingham brief gets you.
A senior over the M42
James from Derby or Phil from Nottingham — both around an hour from central Birmingham. Half-day on-site visit at your office, the rest of the project running over WhatsApp and Loom. No "we’ll Zoom you next month."
Operator-led, not studio-led
No account manager, no project manager, no design-by-committee revision cycle. The person who took the brief writes the copy, designs the pages, ships the deploy and answers the WhatsApp when the opening hours change two months later.
West Midlands catchment
Solihull, Walsall, West Bromwich, Wolverhampton, Dudley, Coventry, Stourbridge, Sutton Coldfield — all inside the half-day on-site visit window from at least one of our two East Midlands bases. Coventry leans Phil; Wolverhampton leans James.
AI-native delivery
Phil was trained AI-native by James and Louis from week one of ChatGPT. The build runs with AI tooling under senior operator supervision — four times faster than the studio cadence, with senior eyes on everything that goes live.
Local SEO baked in
LocalBusiness schema with the right Birmingham address and postcode, Google Business Profile pass with photos and category fixes, per-area landing pages where the buyer journey calls for them ("[service] Birmingham", "[service] Solihull"). The technical foundation, done from day one.
Code that stays yours
The site is built on a stack you own — Laravel + Tailwind in a git repository handed over from day one. If you want a Birmingham developer to take it over later, they can. No exit fee, no lock-in, no proprietary platform.
Studio. Freelancer. Operator. The honest comparison.
Three honest paths a Birmingham SMB can buy a website through. None of them are wrong — they buy different things at different prices. Here’s where Moonlabs actually sits.
All three options ship websites that work. The question is what you’re paying for around the website — and which of those things you actually wanted.
Brief on Monday in Birmingham. Live by the end of the week.
Brief
Half-day on-site at your Birmingham (or West Midlands) office with James or Phil. Plain-English conversation about the business and the site. One-page spec back the same day for the owner to sense-check.
Build
Design, copy, build, deploy across one working week. Staging URL by mid-week for a 15-minute review — in person again, or on a phone if you’d rather not block the diary twice. One operator end-to-end.
Run
£99 / month from launch. New service, new team member, new opening hours, refreshed photography — email or WhatsApp it, we ship it. No hourly billing on edits. The same person who built it answers when you write.
A million ways this could look. None of them templates.
Every site we build is designed to spec, branded for one client. No shared theme between brands. No component kit we recycle. Your site won’t look like anyone else’s because nobody else got your brief.
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Designed to spec. Every page laid out fresh against your brief — not a pre-made template with your logo dropped in. -
Branded to you. Typography, palette, motion language and component shape all chosen for this brand, not a previous client’s. -
Yours forever. Code lives in a git repo that is yours from day one. No platform lock-in, no proprietary CMS, no exit fee.
The Birmingham owner’s questions.
Why not just use a Birmingham agency?
You can — and for some firms it’s the right buy. The trade is usually price and pace. A typical Birmingham studio quote sits between £4,000 and £15,000, with a three-month timeline and a project-manager hierarchy in between you and whoever’s actually building. We’ve removed the studio overhead: one senior operator running the project end to end, one working week from brief to launch, £999 to build and £99 / month to look after. The buyer who wants the Brindleyplace office relationship picks the agency. The buyer who wants the result picks us.
Who from Moonlabs comes to Birmingham?
James from Derby (around an hour up the A38 / M42) or Phil from Nottingham (around an hour via the M42) — depending on whose diary fits and where in the West Midlands you are. James leads commercial conversations and is good company on a first brief; Phil leads delivery and tends to take any brief that’ll go straight to build. Most Birmingham briefs work as a half-day on-site visit, with the rest of the project running over WhatsApp and Loom afterwards.
Will the site rank for "[my service] Birmingham" searches?
Local SEO is baked in: LocalBusiness structured data with the right Birmingham address and postcode, a Google Business Profile pass with photos and category fixes where you don’t already have them, per-area landing pages where the buyer journey calls for them ("[your service] Birmingham", "[your service] Solihull", "[your service] Wolverhampton"). No magic SEO promises — anyone guaranteeing top-of-Google in a quarter is bluffing — but the technical foundation is properly there from day one.
We’re in Solihull / Wolverhampton / Coventry / Walsall — do you cover us?
Yes. The West Midlands coverage from our East Midlands bases is honestly inside the half-day on-site window. Solihull, Walsall and West Bromwich are easy day trips from Derby; Coventry is closer to Phil from Nottingham (around 50 minutes); Wolverhampton and Dudley take a bit longer but still work as a planned half-day. We confirm on the first call who’s coming, from where, and when.
Birmingham has a few good freelancers. What’s the difference?
A good Birmingham freelancer is often the same kind of person we are — a senior operator, one to one with the client, no agency overhead. The honest difference is the £99 / month retainer and the operator stack behind the build. The £99 covers content / copy / image edits after launch (no hourly billing for each change) and the build runs on the same Laravel + Tailwind stack we use on Homemove and home.co.uk — with three other operators behind one if a build needs something specialist.
What if I want to take the site somewhere else later?
You can, any time. The code lives in a git repository that is yours from day one. Cancel the £99 / month with one month’s notice and we hand over the codebase and deployment instructions; another developer (in Birmingham or anywhere else) can take over from there. No exit fee, no stranded content, no platform you cannot leave.
A Birmingham brief, an operator’s build.
Tell us about the business and where in the West Midlands you are. James or Phil will come back inside 24 hours with a meeting slot at your office.
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