A website designer based in Derby.
For East Midlands businesses that want a senior operator across the table at the brief, not a project manager on a Zoom from somewhere else. James is in Derby. £999 to build, £99 a month to look after — and he can come to your office.
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 does the brief in person across the East Midlands and West Midlands. The site is delivered by the same operator who walked into your office.
Brief usYou should know the person building your website.
A Derby business looking for a website usually gets one of two options. A local web-design agency quoting £4,000 to £8,000, three rounds of stakeholder revisions, a logo discussion that takes a week, and a project manager on email who keeps copying in someone called "the studio". Or a faceless freelance marketplace where the person who actually builds it is in another time zone and the only contact form goes to nobody.
Moonlabs is the third option. James is in Derby. He runs the commercial side of the company, takes the brief in person, writes the copy with you on the day, and keeps the build inside the same operator team that runs Homemove, home.co.uk and homedata.co.uk. £999 to build, £99 a month to look after — same price band as a Wix-Business-plus-an-agency-call-off, except the senior operator is the one across the table at the brief.
Six things a Derby brief gets you.
James, on-site, on the day
The brief is taken in person — at your office, the Moonlabs Derby desk, or anywhere in the city centre with a flat surface and a cup of coffee. No agency intake form, no junior account manager, no "we’ll get back to you in 5 business days."
East Midlands catchment
Nottingham, Leicester, Loughborough, Burton, Mansfield, Chesterfield — all inside a 45-minute drive. Sheffield, Birmingham, Coventry, Stoke — inside 75 minutes. Phil takes the Nottingham trips so you get a local face there too.
Same operator, brief to launch
The person who took the brief writes the copy, designs the pages, ships the deploy and answers the WhatsApp two months later when the opening hours change. No "the designer has handed it to the developer" hand-offs.
London-quality, Derby-priced
Same stack, same senior, same design language as a London studio at five times the price — without the London overhead. The £999 is the entire build fee, not the deposit before the "real" quote arrives.
Local SEO baked in
LocalBusiness structured data, proper Google Business Profile pass, per-town pages where the buyer journey calls for it ("boiler repair Belper", "plumbers in Allestree"). No magic SEO promises — just the technical groundwork done properly 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 ever want to take it to another Derby developer, you can. No exit fee, no lock-in.
Eight towns, three rings. The travel times that decide the brief format.
Whether the brief is on-site at your office or split into a half-day visit plus video follow-ups depends on where you are. Here’s how the catchment from Derby actually works.
If you’re outside this map, ask anyway. Louis is on the ground in Norwich and Shivam is on the ground in London — between the four of us, most of England is inside a credible on-site brief window.
Brief on Monday in Derby. Live by the end of the week.
Brief
Half-hour in person with James in Derby (or wherever in the catchment you prefer). 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 if you want it, on a phone if you don’t). One operator end-to-end, no Derby agency middle layer.
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 changes. 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 Derby owner’s questions.
Can James come to our offices for the brief?
Yes — that’s the whole point of a Derby base. James is in Derby, runs the commercial side of Moonlabs, and can take an on-site brief at your office, your favourite café, or the Moonlabs Derby desk. On-site briefs across the East Midlands (Nottingham, Leicester, Loughborough) are typically the same day; further afield (Sheffield, Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester) we schedule a half-day on-site visit and the rest of the project runs via WhatsApp and Loom.
We’re in Nottingham / Leicester / Sheffield / Birmingham. Do you still cover us?
Yes. Derby is the base; the catchment from here covers the whole East Midlands plus the nearer parts of the West Midlands and South Yorkshire. Phil is in Nottingham (so the Nottingham trips can be his), Louis is in Norwich for East Anglia, and Shivam is on the ground in London for the South East. If your office is in any of those orbits, there’s an operator who can come to you without a day-long round trip.
How is this different from a Derby web design agency that quoted me £4,000?
Most local web-design quotes between £3,000 and £8,000 are paying for the agency’s account-management layer, design-by-committee revision rounds and project-management overhead. The actual website is usually the same shape we deliver. We removed the studio overhead, kept the senior operator (James does the brief; the build runs through the same stack we use on Homemove and home.co.uk), and let AI tooling do the rest. The £99 / month replaces the agency’s "care plan" or per-edit hourly rate.
Will the site rank for "[my service] in Derby" / "in [my town]"? Do you handle local SEO?
Yes. Local SEO is baked in: LocalBusiness structured data with the right address, postcode and area-served list; a Google Business Profile review pass with photos and category fixes where you don’t already have it; per-town landing pages where the buyer journey calls for it (e.g. "boiler repair Derby", "boiler repair Belper"). We don’t promise top-of-Google in a quarter — anyone who does is bluffing — but the technical foundation is properly there from day one.
What if our business is multi-site across the East Midlands?
Multi-site is fine. Each location gets its own page with address, opening hours, parking, the local team and the local phone number — under one nav, one design system, one £99 / month. We’ve done this shape for retail, services, salons and clinics. It indexes properly per location so search treats each branch as the local business it actually is.
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 Derby or anywhere else) can take over from there. No exit fee, no stranded content, no platform you cannot leave.
A Derby brief, a national-grade site.
Tell us about the business and where in the East Midlands you are. James will come back inside 24 hours with a meeting slot — at your office or in Derby.
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