J.J. & A.W. Skeet
Surfacing and groundworks across Ryedale, York and Scarborough. Built to prove a family firm is exactly that.
Web design · Scarborough
The season pays. The other eight months decide.
Scarborough businesses live with a summer that looks after itself and a winter that does not. A website that only speaks to visitors is working four months a year.
- Websites from £400
- Built for seasonal trade
- Content written for you
The problem
What we see in Scarborough
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The website is built for July
Written entirely for visitors, with nothing for the year-round local customer who is the difference between a good year and a hard one. The off-season trade is usually there to be won and usually not being asked for.
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Accommodation is giving away the margin
Guest houses, hotels and holiday lets that take almost everything through the booking platforms and hand over a slice of each one. The direct booking is the whole game, and it is won or lost on your own website when the guest opens a second tab to see the real place.
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The competition is genuinely stronger here
Scarborough is much bigger than the Ryedale towns and has far more businesses chasing the same searches. What passes for a decent website in a small market town is middling here, and the standard needed to stand out is higher.
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Half the traffic is on a phone with one bar
Visitors on the seafront, on patchy signal, deciding where to eat. A heavy, slow site loses them to whichever one loaded.
Locally
A bigger town, a harder market
Scarborough is the largest town we work in and the business base reflects that: hospitality and tourism, yes, but also a substantial year-round economy of trades, care providers, retailers, garages and professional services that has nothing to do with the season.
For visitor-facing businesses, the commercial argument is about margin more than volume. The booking platforms and aggregators will bring you customers; what they will not do is bring them back to you directly next time. Your own site is the only channel where you keep the whole amount and own the relationship, which is why it is worth more attention than it usually gets.
For everyone else, the argument is competition. There are more firms here doing what you do, more of them advertising, and more of them with a decent website than you would find in Pickering. Being findable takes more than existing. It takes pages that are specific about services and areas, and content that is genuinely better than the competitor ranking above you.
We should be straight about one thing: Scarborough is more competitive than our home patch, and we would not promise anyone a position here. What we will do is build something that deserves one and tell you honestly what else it would take.
Work
Sites we have built nearby
Both of these are businesses within a few miles of here.
A & J Plant Sales
A filterable machinery listing with a page per machine and a sold archive, run entirely by the dealer.
Sectors
Businesses we work with in Scarborough
Pricing
What it costs
Published, the same for everyone, and the same whether you are up the road or an hour away.
Essential
Up to 5 pages
£400
- Designed for your business, not a template
- Every word written for you
- Fast on a phone, where most people find you
- Enquiries land straight in your inbox
- Built so Google can read it
- Domain, hosting and email sorted
- One round of revisions
Recommended
Complete
Up to 10 pages
£800
- Everything in Essential
- A page per service, so each one can rank
- An areas page, so nearby customers find you
- A fuller work section to win the job
- More internal linking between pages
- One round of revisions
Advanced
Bespoke build
£1,200+
- Everything in Complete
- Built around what your business actually does
- Filterable listings, bookings or directories
- Connected to systems you already use
- Scoped and quoted before anything starts
Need a page or two more than the package allows? We will quote for the extra pages before you commit to anything, so you know the full cost up front. See the full comparison.
FAQs
Questions from Scarborough businesses
Can you get us above the established local agencies?
Not by building a website alone, and we would not claim otherwise. Ranking in a competitive town takes content, reviews, links and time. What a good site does is make sure you deserve to rank and convert the people who do find you, which is worth having regardless of position.
How do we get more direct bookings?
Give people a reason and make it obvious. A better rate than the platform, free parking, late checkout, a room type they cannot book elsewhere, stated plainly on a site that looks better than the listing they just came from. It is a solvable problem and most independents are leaving it alone.
We are quiet from October to March.
Then the site should be selling something for that period. Off-season offers, local trade, functions, a different customer entirely. It will not fix seasonality but it is a lever most businesses here never pull.
You are based in Malton, not Scarborough.
We are, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. It is about forty minutes and most of a website project happens over email and a phone call regardless. If sitting down together matters to you, we will come over.
Advice
Useful before you decide
How to choose a web designer (and what to ask them)
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How to get found on Google locally
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Seven signs your website is costing you work
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