Web design in Falkirk, on one card

What is true about Falkirk businesses right now

Falkirk's High Street is pedestrianised and overlooked by the Steeple, with the Howgate Centre on it and, at the east end, the cleared ground where Callendar Square shopping centre stood until the council pulled it down for the new Town Hall. That building site is the backdrop to the east end of the street until the hall opens, which the council currently puts at summer 2029. Independents cluster on Cow Wynd, Vicar Street, Manor Street and Newmarket Street, and along Bank Street and Cockburn Street off the main run. Grahams Road carries the traffic up to Grahamston station, and the Central Retail Park takes the chains.

The trades I hear from most in Falkirk are hair and beauty, food, gifts and homeware, and the people working from a van out of Bainsford, Camelon and Larbert. The Kelpies at the Helix and the Falkirk Wheel bring more visitors past the town than any other place I work in, and most of them never make it to the High Street, because nothing online tells them what is there.

This summer I went looking for Falkirk hairdressers and barbers with no website of their own, before I emailed a single one. I found twenty-five. On Google Maps, nineteen of them show no website link at all, three point at a Facebook page, one at a Linktree and two at a booking app. Eleven take bookings by Instagram or Facebook message, nine by phone, five through an app. Their average Google rating was 4.9. The businesses are good. What they have online is not.

What Falkirk sites tend to get wrong

Not looks. The problem is that most of them are not really websites. A Facebook page with the opening hours in a pinned post from 2023. A Linktree with three stylists' price lists as images nobody can search. A site built for a desktop in 2019 that, on a phone, is a strip of tiny text down the left with a picture that never loads. Page titles that say "Home". No address in text, so Google cannot tell it is in Falkirk at all.

The one that costs the most money is booking by message. Every enquiry is a conversation. Every conversation is unpaid admin, usually at nine at night, and the moment a phone dies or a page gets locked, the diary goes with it. The list above is what that looks like from the outside, and I have built the fix for a yoga teacher in Ayrshire, so I know both ends of it.

I am not naming anyone. Most of these are good businesses run by one or two people who have never had a quiet week to sort it. That is the whole point of a fixed price and a fixed timescale: it is a job with an end.

What a Falkirk website costs from me

The demo to look at first

For Falkirk I point people at Brackenwynd, the salon demonstration. It is a fictional Falkirk salon with an invented address, but the way it sells is the way the real ones on Cow Wynd and Bank Street sell: you point at the hair you want and the request form already knows which stylist does it. Hair and beauty is the biggest gap I found in the town, so it is the example most Falkirk owners will recognise. Trades in Bainsford or Camelon should look at the joinery demo instead.

Questions Falkirk owners ask me

Can we meet in person in Falkirk?

Yes. I'm in Dollar, about half an hour away, and I would rather see the shop, the van or the salon than guess at it from Instagram. The brief takes an hour at your premises, and everything after that works by email so you have it in writing.

My Facebook page does fine. Why would I need a site?

Facebook is where your regulars find you. A site is where the people who have never heard of you find you: someone searching "barber Falkirk" or "gift shop near the Howgate" on a Saturday morning. Facebook does not show up for that search, and a Linktree does not either. The site sends them to your Facebook page once they have found you, not the other way round.

Do you work with businesses in Grangemouth, Larbert and Denny as well?

Yes, the whole council area. Grangemouth is getting its own page because its trades are different, but the price and the timescale are the same wherever you are. Nearer Stirling? There is a Stirling page, same price, same person.

Reply to the quote

The whole quote is written out on the homepage, price first. There is no form on this page on purpose: one place for enquiries means I answer every one of them myself, usually the same day.

Reply to the quote   What a website costs, in full