A website designer across the East Midlands.
For Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire and Northants businesses that want a senior operator on the ground, not an agency on a Zoom from London. James is in Derby. Phil is in Nottingham. Between them, every East Midlands town is inside a credible on-site brief.
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 in Derby and Phil in Nottingham cover the full East Midlands — same-day on-site briefs from Buxton to Lincoln to Hinckley.
Brief usThe East Midlands is a region. The agencies serving it usually aren’t in it.
If you run a business in Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire or Northants and you want a custom website, most of the agencies pitching you are an hour-plus drive away in Birmingham, Manchester or London. They’ll Zoom you, they’ll quote between £4,000 and £15,000, and the senior they put in front of you on day one will hand the build to a junior on day twenty. None of which makes the work bad; it just makes the relationship one you can’t walk into.
Moonlabs is in the region. James is based in Derby; Phil is based in Nottingham. Between the two, every meaningful East Midlands town is inside a credible same-day or half-day on-site brief. The same operator that runs Homemove, home.co.uk and homedata.co.uk walks into your office, takes the brief, writes the spec, ships the build. £999 to build, £99 a month to look after.
Six things an East Midlands brief gets you.
Two locals across three counties
James lives in Derby. Phil lives in Nottingham. Between the two of us, every East Midlands postcode is inside a credible on-site brief window. No London agency pretending to know the M1.
Same-day on-site, mostly
Most of the region is inside a same-day visit from either base — brief in the morning, one-page spec by the afternoon. Lincoln, Buxton and Northampton stretch to a half-day; we’re honest about which is which.
Multi-site East Midlands support
A retail group with shops across Derbyshire and Notts, a clinic chain across Leics, a recruitment agency with desks in Derby, Notts and Leicester — one design system, one nav, per-location pages, one £99 / month.
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 a regional studio cadence, senior eyes on everything that goes live.
Local SEO at town level
LocalBusiness structured data with the right address, postcode and area-served list; Google Business Profile pass per location; per-town landing pages ("[service] Derby", "[service] Lincoln", "[service] Loughborough") where the buyer journey calls for them.
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 local developer to take it over later, they can. No exit fee, no lock-in, no proprietary platform.
Ten East Midlands towns. Which operator runs the brief.
Where each operator lives, where they reach to, and what kind of on-site brief that translates into. Grouped by sub-region so you can find your postcode quickly.
Outside this map? Louis is on the ground in Norwich for East Anglia and Shivam is on the ground in London for the South East. Most of England is inside a credible on-site brief window from one of the four bases.
Brief on Monday somewhere in the region. Live by the end of the week.
Brief
James or Phil drives to your office — whoever’s closer. Plain-English conversation about the business and the site. One-page spec back the same day for the owner to sense-check, in WhatsApp.
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 East Midlands owner’s questions.
Two operators across three counties — who runs my brief?
Depends on where you are. James is based in Derby and leads commercial conversations — he tends to take any brief in Derbyshire, the western half of Leicestershire, and the south side of the West Midlands. Phil is based in Nottingham and leads delivery — he tends to take any brief in Nottinghamshire, eastern Leicestershire, Lincolnshire and any client whose project is going straight to build. We confirm on the first call who’s coming, from where, and when.
We have multiple offices across the East Midlands — does the site support that?
Yes. Multi-site is the easy case for us. 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 site so local search treats each branch as the local business it actually is.
Will you cover the further-out East Midlands towns — Lincoln, Northampton, Buxton, the Peak District?
Yes — with realistic travel windows. Lincoln, Mansfield, Worksop, Newark are all comfortably inside the same-day on-site visit window from Nottingham. Buxton, Matlock, the upper Peak District work as a half-day from Derby. Northampton sits further south — usually a half-day visit from either base. We’ll tell you on the first call whether your specific postcode is same-day or half-day; we don’t bluff travel times to win briefs.
Will the site rank for "East Midlands" as well as town-level?
Local SEO is baked in at both levels. A regional landing page targets "East Midlands" intent properly (the operating region, the towns covered, the sub-regional language a buyer actually uses). Town-level landing pages target the specific local intent ("[your service] Derby", "[your service] Nottingham", "[your service] Lincoln"). LocalBusiness schema and Google Business Profile work at the town level; an organisation-level schema covers the regional roll-up. No magic SEO promises, but the foundation is there from day one.
Why an East Midlands web designer rather than a London or Manchester one?
For most East Midlands businesses, the answer is the same as why you bank locally: the relationship is easier when the senior is reachable. A London or Manchester agency will Zoom you, but the £8–£15k bill is partly paying for a Canary Wharf or Northern Quarter office you’ll never walk into. We’re in Derby and Nottingham, do the brief on-site, and run the project on the same Laravel + Tailwind stack we use on our own UK property businesses (Homemove, home.co.uk, homedata.co.uk).
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 the East Midlands or anywhere else) can take over from there. No exit fee, no stranded content, no platform you cannot leave.
A regional brief, a same-day spec.
Tell us about the business and where in the East Midlands you are. James or Phil — whoever’s closer — will come back inside 24 hours with a meeting slot at your office.
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