Websites and advertising for Kensington's independent businesses
For a boutique, a salon or a restaurant here, presentation is not decoration on top of the business. It is the business. Somebody who has decided your neighbourhood is where they shop has already accepted the price. What they are deciding on your website is whether you look like the sort of place they want to walk into, and they decide that in about two seconds, on a phone, usually after tapping a link in an Instagram bio.
Which creates the problem I spend most of my time on with businesses like yours: the site has to be image-led and still load fast. Those two things fight each other, and most beautiful independent websites in this borough lose the fight. I build the ones that do not, and I run the Meta Ads that feed them.
In person across London. Anywhere in the UK on request. Remote worldwide.
What businesses here usually need
A beautiful site that takes six seconds
Full-screen imagery, a slideshow on the homepage, three custom fonts, an autoplaying video header, and forty product photographs uploaded straight from the camera at eight megabytes each. It looks right on the designer's desktop and it is close to unusable on a phone outside the shop. Almost every independent site I am asked to look at in this borough has this exact problem.
The Instagram to website drop
The feed is doing its job. People tap the link. Then they land somewhere that looks like a different business, cannot find opening hours, and cannot book or buy without two more taps. That gap is where most of the attention the social work earned gets thrown away, and it is a page problem rather than a content problem.
Three different brands, one business
The shopfront says one thing, the Instagram grid says another, the website was built four years ago and says a third, and the Google listing has a photograph from before the refurbishment. For a business where the whole proposition is taste and consistency, that inconsistency is read as carelessness, and it is visible to a customer before they ever reach you.
The build, then the advertising that feeds it
The build leads because everything else points at it. A full five to eight page site is £1,950, and for a business like yours the work is mostly in making imagery behave: properly sized and compressed at multiple widths, modern formats, loaded in the right order so the first thing a customer sees arrives immediately rather than after the gallery at the bottom. The aim is a site that looks considered and still opens in under two seconds on a phone on the street outside.
Then Meta Ads, because Facebook and Instagram are where your customers actually are and where the visual work you are already doing can be put to use. The same person builds both, so the ad, the page it lands on and the Google listing say the same thing in the same voice, which is the thing that falls apart when a studio does the design and somebody else runs the media.
Image-heavy builds, and the channels around them
Retail, hospitality, trades and services, several of them photography-led and several running WooCommerce with real product catalogues. They are listed by name on the portfolio with links, so you can open them on your own phone and judge how they load rather than take my word for it.
For Falak Almurjan I run the social media across Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn alongside the website, the SEO, the Google Business Profile and the Meta Ads. Every channel managed by the same person is exactly the arrangement that keeps a brand consistent, and it is the relevant reference for a business where consistency is the product.
Getting Core Web Vitals into the green on an image-led site is a specific discipline rather than a plugin. It is image pipelines, font loading, and load order, judged on real-user field data rather than a score on my laptop. This is the part of the build I would want you to judge me on.
What else I can take off your hands
In the order that usually makes sense for a Kensington business, rather than the order that suits me.
The Google Business Profile matters more than the rankings for a business with a door on a street. Photographs that match the current interior, correct hours, posts when something changes, and reviews arriving steadily. Somebody deciding between you and two similar places nearby is looking at exactly those things, and a profile with photos from before the refit is actively working against you.
Worth more than it looks for a business like this, because an image-led site degrades. New photographs get uploaded at full size by whoever has the login, a plugin update breaks the gallery, the seasonal menu is three seasons old. The edit allowance covers the regular changes, and the Care Plus tier adds a quarterly speed audit with the fixes applied, which is what stops the site sliding back.
For one event or one launch: a collection arriving, a treatment being introduced, a private dining offer, a seasonal residency. A single page that matches the campaign it belongs to, rather than sending paid traffic to a homepage that talks about everything. Last on the list because with a well-built main site you may not need one at all.
What it costs
Every price is a starting point, and every service page has the full tiers. No contracts. Cancel any time.
Asked in Kensington
We have a designer we like. Can you build what they give you?
Yes, and it is often the best arrangement. They own the look, I make it work on a phone. Where a design will cost real speed, a video header, four custom font weights, a full-bleed gallery above the fold, I will tell you what it costs in load time and offer an alternative that keeps the intent. You decide. What I will not do is quietly ship something slow and let you find out from customers.
Can an image-led site actually be fast, or is that a trade-off we accept?
It can, and the trade-off is mostly a myth that comes from photographs being served at the wrong size. The same picture at the right dimensions in a modern format is frequently a tenth of the file with no visible difference on a phone. Get the image pipeline, the font loading and the load order right and a photography-led site sits in the green. It is unglamorous work and it is where the difference actually comes from.
Our Instagram does well but the website does nothing. Why?
Usually because the two are not the same business as far as the visitor is concerned. The feed sets an expectation, and the landing point does not meet it, or it asks for two more taps before anyone can book, buy or find your hours. Fixing the handover is a page problem, not a content problem, and it is usually the cheapest meaningful improvement available to a business in your position.
Does £1,950 include photography?
No, and I would not want it to. You supply the photography, and for a business in this borough you almost certainly have better than anything I could commission on a web build budget. For Meta Ads the same applies: included creatives are static unless quoted otherwise, and you supply the photography and video footage. I will tell you precisely what to shoot and at what dimensions.