Custom builds

Web development in Blackpool, for when a website isn't the whole job.

We do web development as well as web design: booking and payment systems, customer portals, integrations, large shops and software built from scratch, all from our studio at the Blackpool Enterprise Centre and priced as a fixed project, quoted in writing. Our £29.99 plan covers a five-page site for a local business, and for most people that's exactly right. Some jobs need software though: bookings, logins, payments, stock, a portal your staff live in all day. We build those too, and have done for years: BoothZen, EventLayer and the Bureau volunteering platform are ours.

Tell us what you need →Not sure which you need?

The line is simple: does it need to do something?

A site that shows people who you are, what you do and how to reach you is the monthly plan. The moment it has to take a booking, hold a customer's login, move money, talk to another system, or run part of your business day to day, it's a custom build. Different job, different price, same studio and the same person answering your messages. A straightforward pay-monthly online shop is the one exception: that's the £19.99 shop add-on on the monthly plan, £49.98 a month all in, not a custom build.

Bookings & payments

Availability, deposits, cancellations, automatic confirmations. Built around how you actually take work rather than bent around an off-the-shelf plugin.

Portals & logins

Somewhere customers, staff or partners sign in and see their own view of things. Usually the part that saves the most admin time.

Integrations

Making your website talk to the systems you already pay for, so nobody is retyping the same data into two screens.

Shops at scale

Hundreds or thousands of products, real stock control, trade pricing, product feeds. Past the point where a simple shop add-on copes.

Software from scratch

A platform that is the business rather than a brochure for it. Separate customer accounts, an API, the lot.

Rescues

Someone built you something and walked away, or it's held together with plugins. We've taken plenty of those over.

Already built, already running

This isn't a sideline.

These are ours: designed, built, hosted and still maintained by us. Real customers use them every day, and we're the ones who get the call when something needs doing.

BoothZen

Booking platform, built from scratch

A management system for photo booth businesses: bookings, leads, payments and the admin behind them. It has its own REST API, a developer portal, plugins for WordPress and Joomla, and integrations with Zapier and Make, because customers wanted it wired into what they already used.

EventLayer

Multi-tenant platform

An event photography platform where every business gets its own space, its own customers and its own branding, all running on one system we maintain. The kind of build where the architecture decisions matter more than the pixels.

The Bureau, volunteering

Web app for a charity

A volunteer management system: public opportunity listings, a real apply-and-track journey, and three separate portals, one each for volunteers, partner organisations and the staff running the programme. Three audiences, one system, the charity's own branding rather than a vendor's.

Hardware, when it's needed

Print servers & fleet management

Print server software running on Raspberry Pi units in the field, with a hub for managing the fleet remotely. Mentioned not to show off, but because "can you make it talk to that machine over there" is a question we can usually say yes to.

More in our work, including the Bureau volunteering platform case study.

What it's built with

No mystery about the tools.

Some agencies keep this vague. We would rather you knew, and could hand this page to a developer friend for a second opinion.

Laravel & PHP

The framework behind every platform we run. Boring, proven, and still maintained in ten years.

PostgreSQL & MySQL

Proper relational databases, backed up nightly, with the data staying yours.

Stripe & GoCardless

Card payments, subscriptions and direct debits, handled by people regulated to handle them.

REST APIs

Your system can talk to other systems, and ours ship with documentation rather than a shrug.

Zapier & Make

Wiring into the thousand tools you already use without us writing custom glue for each one.

Linux hosting we run

Not resold cPanel. We manage the servers, so when something breaks we can actually fix it.

No page builders, no themes bought off a marketplace, and nothing that stops working when a plugin author loses interest. Every build runs on the same UK servers we manage ourselves as our monthly-plan sites.

How custom work is priced

Honestly: it depends, and anyone who quotes you a number before understanding the job is guessing. What we can promise is how we get to the number, and that you'll see it in writing before anything starts.

A conversation, free

Usually half an hour. What the thing needs to do, who uses it, what happens today and what's costing you time.

A written scope and a fixed price

What's included, what isn't, and what it costs. Fixed, not hourly, so the risk of it running long is ours and not yours.

Built in stages you can see

You get access as it's built rather than a reveal at the end, so course corrections cost a conversation instead of a change request.

A monthly figure to keep it running

Hosting, updates, backups, monitoring and support, quoted for your build. Bigger systems cost more to look after than a five-page site, and we'd rather say so than pretend otherwise.

What you can expect

A fixed project price, agreed in writing before we start.

A custom monthly figure for hosting and support, not the £29.99 plan stretched to fit.

Staged payments tied to what's been delivered.

The code and the data are yours. No lock-in, no ransom.

The same person throughout. Whoever builds it is who you talk to.

And if the conversation ends with "you don't need this, the monthly plan will do you", we'll say that. It happens often, and it's cheaper for you and easier for us.

Start with a conversation →

The questions people actually ask

Usually somewhere around the second message, once the polite ones are out of the way.

How long does a custom build take?

Small ones, a few weeks. A platform, a few months. We give you a timeline with the written scope, and if something is going to slip we tell you when we find out rather than the week it was due.

What happens when I need changes later?

You ask, and it either falls inside your monthly support or we quote it. Small tweaks are almost always just included. Nobody has ever been billed by us for asking.

Who owns the code and the data?

You do, both of them, from day one. If you ever want to move to another developer we hand over the code, the database and the hosting details without an argument or an exit fee.

What if you get run over by a bus?

A fair question that nobody asks out loud. Everything is in standard Laravel with the code in a repository you can be given access to, so any competent developer can pick it up. That is exactly why we do not build on anything exotic.

Do you outsource it?

No. The person who scopes your project is the person who builds it and the person who answers your WhatsApp or email.

Can you take over something someone else built?

Usually. We will look at it honestly and tell you whether it is worth rescuing or whether you would spend less starting again. Sometimes the honest answer is the second one.

Do you do web development in Blackpool, or just web design?

Both. The same team of six at the Blackpool Enterprise Centre that builds £29.99-a-month brochure sites also builds booking systems, customer portals, integrations and whole platforms like BoothZen and EventLayer, in Laravel and PHP, hosted on servers we run ourselves. The studio has been going since 2016 and there is no separate development agency behind the curtain.

How much does custom web development cost?

It depends on the job, and we will not guess a number before understanding it. What you get is a fixed project price agreed in writing after a free scoping conversation, staged payments tied to what has been delivered, and a separate monthly figure for hosting, backups and support quoted for your build rather than the £29.99 plan stretched to fit. If the honest answer is that the monthly plan will do you, we say so.