A website designer covering Manchester.
For Manchester and North West businesses that want a senior operator on the project, not a Northern Quarter studio with a project manager and a £15k quote. Phil travels in 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.
Phil schedules a planned half-day in Manchester — brief, staging review, launch walk-through. The single travel day covers the whole North West ring.
Brief usManchester has the studios. It also has the studio prices.
Manchester has one of the strongest digital studio scenes in the UK — Northern Quarter, MediaCityUK, Spinningfields, Ancoats. They’re good, and they price like it. A typical SMB quote sits between £6,000 and £20,000 with a three-month timeline and an account-management layer between the buyer and whoever’s actually writing the code. For a lot of Greater Manchester businesses, that’s the wrong shape: you want the site, not the studio relationship.
Moonlabs is the third option. We don’t pretend to be a Manchester local — Phil is in Nottingham and travels in for the brief, M1 / M62 or the Sheffield train. Half-day visit at your office, project runs remote on the same Laravel + Tailwind stack we use on Homemove, home.co.uk and homedata.co.uk. £999 to build, £99 a month to look after. Same outcome as a Manchester studio, roughly a tenth of the bill.
Six things a Manchester brief gets you.
Phil travels in for the brief
M1 / M62 by car or Nottingham → Sheffield → Manchester Piccadilly by train. Phil schedules a planned half-day in your office — brief, staging review, launch walk-through. Build runs remote from Nottingham in between.
Greater Manchester catchment
Salford, MediaCityUK, Trafford, Old Trafford, Stockport, Bolton, Bury, Warrington — all reachable on the same travel day if your office is there. Liverpool and Preston are stretchier but planned-day visits work.
Operator-led, not studio-led
No account manager, no design-by-committee. Phil writes the copy, designs the pages and ships the deploy. Three other operators behind one if a build needs something specialist (James for commercial, Louis for architecture, Shivam for investor-facing work).
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 Northern Quarter studio cadence, with senior eyes on everything that goes live.
Local SEO baked in
LocalBusiness schema with the right Manchester address and postcode, Google Business Profile pass, per-area landing pages where the buyer journey calls for them ("[service] Manchester", "[service] Stockport"). 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 Manchester developer to take it over later, they can. No exit fee, no lock-in, no proprietary platform.
Eight North West towns. Reachable on one trip to Manchester.
Phil’s North West travel day starts in Nottingham and picks up brief meetings across Greater Manchester. Here’s how much of the region is reachable on a single trip.
Phil schedules the travel day around your diary, not ours. Most North West briefs are done as a single planned visit with the rest of the project running remote from Nottingham afterwards.
Brief on Monday in Manchester. Live by the end of the week.
Brief
Phil travels in for a half-day at your Manchester (or wider North West) office. 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 — on a phone usually, in person if Phil’s back up north anyway. 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 Manchester owner’s questions.
Who from Moonlabs comes to Manchester?
Phil. He’s based in Nottingham, leads delivery at Moonlabs, and "travels nationally for client work" is a real description rather than a marketing line. Manchester is around 1h 45 min by car via the M1 / M62, or 1h 50 min by train (Nottingham → Sheffield → Manchester Piccadilly). Most Manchester briefs work as a planned half-day visit on a single travel day, with the rest of the project running remote from Nottingham afterwards.
Why not just use a Manchester-based studio?
You can — Manchester has a serious studio scene around the Northern Quarter, MediaCityUK and Spinningfields. A typical SMB quote sits between £6,000 and £20,000 with a three-month timeline. 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. We’re not a local face in Manchester (we don’t pretend to be) — but the result is the same shape of site at roughly a tenth of the cost.
We’re in Stockport / Salford / Bolton / Warrington — does that work?
Yes. The whole Greater Manchester ring and the wider North West sit inside the half-day visit window once Phil is already in Manchester. The travel day picks up Salford, Trafford, Stockport, Bolton, Bury or Warrington on the same trip if your office is there. Liverpool and Preston are stretchier but planned; we’re honest on the first call about whether your specific postcode is comfortable on the day or needs a separate trip.
How is this different from a Manchester freelancer at £1k–£2k?
A good Manchester 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), the build runs on the same Laravel + Tailwind stack we use on Homemove and home.co.uk, and there are three other operators behind one if a build needs something specialist.
Will the site rank for "[my service] Manchester" searches?
Local SEO is baked in: LocalBusiness structured data with the right Manchester 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] Manchester", "[your service] Stockport", "[your service] Salford"). Manchester search is competitive — we don’t promise top-of-Google in a quarter — but the technical foundation is properly there from day one.
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 Manchester or anywhere else) can take over from there. No exit fee, no stranded content, no platform you cannot leave.
A Manchester brief, a Nottingham-built site.
Tell us about the business and where in the North West you are. Phil will come back inside 24 hours with a half-day travel slot at your office.
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