Web design across Kent.

byMichael is a web design studio in Faversham. I build bespoke websites, Shopify and WooCommerce stores, SEO foundations and custom systems for businesses across Kent. Sites start from £500; Shopify stores from £2,000.

The county covers a lot of ground, and a website that works in one part of it can be the wrong build entirely twenty miles away. Broadly, four economies sit inside Kent, and they buy differently.

North Kent and the Thames Gateway — Sittingbourne, Faversham, Sheppey. Logistics, manufacturing, trades and industrial supply. Buyers here are frequently other businesses, checking whether you are a real company before they send a specification. Capability detail and proof of work matter more than polish.

Canterbury and the east coast — Canterbury, Whitstable, Margate, Folkestone. Tourism, hospitality, independent retail and a large student population. Trade is seasonal in opposite directions depending on which of those you serve, and a large share of decisions happen on a phone, outdoors, in the next twenty minutes.

West Kent and the Weald — Tunbridge Wells, Sevenoaks, the villages. Professional services, established firms and London-adjacent expectations. A site here is judged on whether it looks credible next to a City competitor.

Ashford and the M20 corridor — commuters on one side, freight and B2B on the other. Two audiences with almost nothing in common, often on the same website.

Whatever the sector, the same three problems come up across the county.

You are competing with London on price, not on distance. Kent businesses regularly compare a local studio against agencies an hour up the line. The honest answer is that a bespoke site from a one-person studio costs a fraction of an agency retainer and you speak to the person building it — but only if the work stands up. That is why every site here is coded from scratch rather than assembled from a template.

Local search is decided by structure, not by repetition. Ranking for a service plus a town name is not about how many times the town appears on the page. It needs one page per service with real substance, a maintained Google Business Profile, and honest geography. Nine near-identical pages with the place name swapped is the most common local SEO mistake in the county, and Google has been discounting it for years.

Most of your traffic is on a phone, often on mobile data. Rural Kent signal is not what it is in a city. A site carrying uncompressed images and a page builder loading scripts it never uses will lose people before they see the offer.

A short conversation first — a call or an email exchange about the business, what the site needs to do, and where you currently sit online. Then a written quote with fixed scope, timeline and price. No hourly billing and no scope creep.

Most business websites go live within one to two weeks. Larger bespoke projects take longer and the timeline is agreed upfront. Every build includes SEO foundations as standard: clean semantic structure, schema markup, sitemap, performance basics and the technical groundwork AI search tools use to cite a business accurately.

Nearly all of it happens remotely. Faversham is central enough to reach most of the county in under an hour if a face-to-face makes sense, but most clients never need one.