Web Development For Small Businesses and Startups

Who Am I?

My name is Robert Brown and I'm a UK-based web development specialist.

If you've been struggling with countless "web designers" and "SEO experts", and have a website that still isn't bringing in new business, you've finally found the person to sort it out.

I have over 20 years experience (see my LinkedIn profile) in software programming, web development, server management, SEO, and SEM.

Having reached the top in my professional career, I quit the day job in 2016, leaving my role as Technical Director for an online advertising agency in London.

I now specialise in helping small businesses and startups with anything tech-related, usually rebuilding badly-performing websites.

What Do I Do?

A lot of my time is spent re-building websites that have been knocked up in WordPress or other such platforms by so-called "web-designers".

The majority of my clients have paid for a new website 2-3 times over, then hired an "SEO expert", yet still don't seem to be growing online.

Unfortunately the web-design industry is full of "web-designers" who actually don't know much about web-development, and instead simply use drag-and-drop tools like WordPress, Wix, or SquareSpace to knock up a website in a few hours, and call themselves experts.

I'm here to proclaim, I am the expert.

I build websites from scratch, I build and manage servers, I improve websites ranking in Google, and I help you to understand some of the basics in this online world, to help ensure you don't get ripped off in the future, and hopefully spread the word.

I have a no-nonsense approach to helping your business succeed.

"But My Website Looks Really Nice"

I'm sure it does, but as I always say, "there's more to building a website, than just building a website".

A nice looking theme or template can be yours for less than £50, take a look at ThemeForest for some examples.

Most web-designers take one of these nice-looking, pre-built, templates, and simply copy and paste your content into them.

If they use a platform like WordPress, Wix, or SquareSpace, they don't need to know anything technical about how a website actually works.

The result may look pretty, but under-the-hood there are countless problems you're probably unaware of, moreover, so is the web-designer.

All you know is, something isn't right, and then you pay someone else to try and fix it, again and again.

Many of my clients have been round this cycle a couple of times before finding me.

That's why I created a simple health check, a collection of industry-standard tools that help shine a light on shoddy websites.

If you're struggling to rank highly in Google, and aren't attracting new customers, the whole foundation of your website is probably to blame, not to mention the person who built it.

A web-designer may "build" you a website for £500, but by simple economics, an investment of £500 isn't going to bring in the tens of thousands of pounds of additional revenue you need to grow your business, it's just not that easy.

Likewise, just because a "web design agency" charges you £4,000 doesn't mean they're doing a good job - try putting some of their portfolio sites through the health check to see how good they really are.

"But WordPress is so popular, surely all those people can't be wrong?"

Actually they can, because "all those people" are not true web developers to begin with, they don't have degrees in computer science, and aren't traditionally trained in software engineering. They use drag-and-drop software to build you a website, using a pretty template they found for £20.

WordPress is super simple to use, and very lucrative when you can knock up a website in an afternoon, and charge someone £1,000 for it.

"What Does 'Slow' Actually Look Like?"

The easiest way to demonstrate site speed is by using a simple Google product called PageSpeed Insights. Not surprisingly this is the tool they use as one of the factors when deciding how highly a website should rank in search results.

I can not stress this enough, this is Google's own tool, anyone who tells you to ignore the results are simply mad.

You can find this tool along with a few others on our simple health check page.

Here's a few examples of what my clients have experienced, before I fixed it by re-building their website.

Fixing speed issues like this should always be the first step, before spending money on SEO.

IT Consultancy & Web Development

I can help with any tech-related issues, typically this falls under web design and development.

Whether you need a more reliable solution to running your business, or you want to take over the world with a brand new concept, I can help.

From booking systems, to online payments, shopping baskets, uploading and processing files, you name it, I can do it.

If you're currently running your business via Excel, we should definitely talk!

For some examples of my work and experience, please see the Case Studies section.

Experience & Expertise

If it's related to tech, chances are I can handle it, and if not, I'll know someone who can.

My day-to-day work usually involves:

Building and configuring servers to host web applications.
Designing modern and responsive web sites.
Database design and build.
Back-end programming, in scalable languages, such as C, Java, Perl, etc.
Front-end designing and coding with HTML, CSS (typically Bootstrap) and Javascript (including jQuery).
Monitoring and optimising servers and platforms.

A lot of my time is spent re-building websites from the ground up, and applications that were either botched together in WordPress, or written in PHP, Node, Ruby, or some other new language all the "cool kids" are using, yet hasn't been put together correctly.

Personally I prefer road-tested and mature languages, that I know will scale up when needed.

The Founder

I studied software engineering at Sheffield Hallam Univeristy in the UK and graduated with a degree in Computing Mathematics BSc (Hon) in 2002.

I've actually been programming since I was 7 years old, starting on a Commadore Vic-20, so by any standard, I'm a true geek.

With a degree in Computing Mathematics, I have a solid foundation in key concepts such as computational-complexity and artificial intelligence.

I've worked in a variety of industries including online-recruitment, e-commerce, rental-subscriptions, and digital advertising.

I do everything, literally everything.

I live just south of Manchester with my wife and 6 year old daughter.

Although I'm based in the UK, I have clients all around the world, and always make myself available in any timezone.

Liuks Consulting Ltd

Web consultant for small businesses and start-ups