AboutLacombe Web Design

Lacombe Web Design was started by Daniel Shuttleworth, after enough years of looking at small-business websites to notice the same thing going wrong on most of them. The design was rarely the problem. The problem was that the site never got round to saying what the business did, what it cost, or why anybody should choose it over the larger competitor down the highway.

That gap is expensive and almost invisible. Nobody emails to tell you they could not find your hours, so the enquiries you lose that way never show up as anything except a quiet month. Fixing it is unglamorous work — deciding what goes in the first screenful, cutting three paragraphs down to one, putting the phone number where a thumb already is — and it is most of the job.

The studio is deliberately one person. That caps how much work it can take, which is the trade being made: fewer clients, but nobody hands your project to a junior after the pitch, and the person who understood your business in the first meeting is the person still answering the phone two years later.

It works out of an office on 46 Street, which is worth saying only because a lot of businesses calling themselves local to somewhere are a laptop three hours away. If you want to sit down and go through the thing on a screen rather than describe it over the phone, that is genuinely easier here.