Website Design

Most buying decisions for a local trade, a professional service or a growing SME happen in seconds. A visitor lands on your site, forms an impression, and either keeps reading or leaves. That impression is almost entirely visual before it's ever about content: typography, spacing, colour, imagery and how confidently the page is laid out.

A lot of local businesses in Crawley and across Sussex are still running on template sites bought off the shelf five, eight, ten years ago — or worse, a free builder site that looks like thousands of others. The business itself might be excellent. The website undersells it every single day.

UNIT10 treats website design as a trust exercise, not a decoration exercise. Every layout decision — how much whitespace, how large the type, how the page breaks into sections, what gets a photo and what doesn't — is there to answer one question for the visitor: can I trust this business with my money or my project?

Template and theme-based sites are built to look acceptable for any business in any industry. That's the problem: they're built to not be wrong for anyone, which means they're never exactly right for you. Custom design starts from your business, your customers and your competitors, and builds outward.

In practice that means real information architecture (what pages exist and why, in what order), a genuine design system (a defined type scale, colour palette and set of components used consistently, not one-off pages that don't match each other), and layouts built for how your specific customers actually decide — a plumber's quote page needs different structure to a school's admissions page.

We start with discovery — understanding your business, your customers, and what's currently working and not working about your existing presence. From there we map the site's structure before a single pixel is designed, because a beautifully designed page in the wrong place on the site is still a mistake.

Design happens in Figma, in full view — you see work in progress, not a single reveal at the end. We design mobile-first, because most of your visitors are on a phone, and a design that's an afterthought on mobile is a design that's failing most of your traffic.

Once design is approved, it hands off directly into development (see our Website Development page) with no loss of fidelity — what you approved is what gets built, pixel for pixel, animation for animation.

Beautiful design that doesn't generate enquiries is expensive decoration. Every page we design has a clear job: get a phone call, a form submission, a quote request, a booking. Calls to action are deliberate, forms are as short as they can be, and trust signals (accreditations, guarantees, real work) sit where a visitor actually needs reassurance, not buried in a footer.

This is where design and conversion rate optimisation overlap — see our CRO work — but it starts here, at the design stage, because the strongest CRO improvement is usually not fixing a bad page, it's not building a bad page in the first place.