Blueprint is based in Richmond and works across the borough — Twickenham, Teddington, St Margarets, Barnes, East Sheen, Kew, Whitton and Hampton. That isn't a service-area list bolted onto a national site. It's the reason I can come and look at your shop before I design anything.
Why it matters that I'm nearby.
Most web designers will never see the business they're building for. They work from a form you filled in and a logo you emailed over. It's efficient, and it's why so many small-business sites feel like they could belong to anyone.
I'd rather come and stand in the room. I want to see which way the light falls across your counter at ten in the morning, what the queue does at lunchtime, and which of your products people actually pick up. That's where the ideas come from — the ones that make a site look like your business rather than a template with your name dropped into it.
It also means I can take the photographs. Stock imagery is the fastest way to make a real place look like a fake one, and a phone camera in the right light beats a purchased photo of somebody else's bakery every time.
And when something needs changing after launch, I'm a short bus ride away rather than a support ticket.
Roughly the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames and the streets either side of it. If you're just outside and it's a short hop, ask anyway.
Where I'm based. A town centre that gets serious footfall from people who don't live here — which makes being findable before they arrive worth more than it is almost anywhere else nearby.
I play rugby, so I know exactly what a match weekend does to trade here. A site that can say "we're open, and here's how to find us" on those days is doing real work.
A long high street of independents with a genuinely local customer base. Repeat trade rather than passing trade, which changes what a website needs to do.
Small, village-ish, and full of businesses that survive on being known. Usually the ones with the most word-of-mouth and the least web presence.
Two different characters a mile apart — one tucked around the pond, one strung along a main road. They want quite different things from a homepage.
Kew gets visitors with a plan and an afternoon. Whitton and Hampton are more everyday. All three reward a site that answers "are you open, and where exactly?" in the first screen.
Worth saying plainly, because it's the thing most people get wrong.
A new website does not appear in Google on its own. Google has to be told it exists, and it has to have some reason to show yours rather than somebody else's. For a business with one shop and one postcode, that reason is almost always local.
In practice that means three things: a Google Business Profile that's actually filled in, a site that says where you are in words rather than only on a map, and your name, address and phone number written identically everywhere they appear. Get those right and you can turn up for "coffee near me" without ever ranking for anything competitive.
I'll do the technical half of that as part of a build — page titles and descriptions, a sitemap, your details marked up so Google can read them, and the site submitted to Search Console. It's £95 as an add-on, and it's the same work I've done on this site.
The half I can't do for you is the Business Profile itself, because Google verifies it against you personally. I'll tell you exactly what to put in it.
What it won't do.
None of this makes you outrank a national directory or an agency that's been buying links for a decade. It isn't meant to. It's meant to make sure that when somebody two streets away searches for what you sell, you're in the running at all — which, right now, most small businesses around here are not.
If anyone promises you page one for a competitive phrase at this price, they're selling you something else.
Tell me what your business is and what's getting in the way. I'll come and have a look.