Web Design Northern Ireland: Websites Built to Win Enquiries
Table of Contents
Web Design Northern Ireland , ProfileTree is a Belfast web design and digital marketing agency, founded in 2011 and based at the McSweeney Centre. We design and build WordPress, WooCommerce and Shopify websites for businesses and public bodies across Northern Ireland, with brochure sites from £2,000, typical timelines of eight to sixteen weeks, and copy, video and SEO produced by the same in-house team.
That single team is the reason most clients come to us. Whoever designs your site also writes for it, films for it and looks after its search visibility after launch, so nobody can blame a gap between suppliers when enquiries do not arrive. We have completed more than 1,000 projects and hold more than 500 Google reviews with a 5.0 rating. If your business is in the city itself, our page on web design in Belfast covers the local detail, and the projects page shows finished work.
Projects run remotely as standard, so a sole trader in Fermanagh follows the same process as a manufacturer outside Antrim. This page sets out what we build, which sectors we know well, what a site costs and how a project runs from the first call to handover. To start, send your brief or call 028 9568 0364, and we will come back with a scope and a fixed price.
Five types of Web Design Northern Ireland projects
The right starting point depends on what the site needs to do for the business rather than on how many pages it has. Each of the five project types below sits within our wider website design service, and WordPress is the platform for the large majority of them.
Brochure and lead generation websites
A lead generation site is a focused build for service businesses that need enquiries rather than online sales. It usually runs to five to fifteen pages covering services, sectors, credentials and contact details, and it is planned around the actions you want a visitor to take, whether that is a phone call, a form or a booking. Solicitors, accountants, trades, consultancies and B2B suppliers make up most of these projects, and it is the small business website that Northern Ireland firms ask us for most often.
WordPress design and development
WordPress is our default for businesses that intend to publish content, add service or location pages over time, or edit the site themselves. Every build uses a custom theme rather than a bought template, which keeps the code lean and the layout specific to the business. Your team gets an editor it can use without phoning us for every change of wording.
Ecommerce builds for customers in Northern Ireland and the Republic
We build shops on WooCommerce or Shopify. WooCommerce suits retailers who want content and search visibility alongside the shop, while Shopify suits retailers who prefer a simpler technical environment and accept the monthly platform fee. Both are set up for the way trade works here, with sterling and euro pricing, delivery zones for Great Britain and the Republic, and VAT handling that changes with the destination. Our guide to ecommerce web design packages compares the options in more detail.
Website redesigns and rebuilds
A redesign is a different job from a new build. It starts with an audit of the pages that currently earn traffic and enquiries, then a redirect map so those rankings survive the move, and only then a decision about what to keep. Most redesign clients come to us because the current site looks dated or has stopped producing leads, and our page on website redesign in Belfast explains how we rebuild and relaunch without losing search visibility.
Hosting, maintenance and support
Managed hosting covers security and plugin updates, backups, uptime monitoring and small content changes. It is optional, but most clients take our website hosting and management because a WordPress site that nobody updates tends to become a security and speed problem within a year or two.
Choosing a platform
Platform choice is a business decision more than a technical one, and it is the question we are asked most often in first meetings. The useful test is how you intend to run the site once it is handed over.
| Platform | Suits | Ongoing cost | Content and SEO control | Our recommendation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress | Businesses publishing content and adding service or location pages over time | Hosting and support only, with no licence fee | High, with full control of structure and markup | Our default for service businesses and public bodies |
| WooCommerce | Retailers who want a shop alongside a content and search strategy | Hosting and support, plus some paid extensions | High, with the same control as WordPress | The better fit when search traffic will drive sales |
| Shopify | Retailers who want predictable maintenance and a simpler back office | Monthly platform fee, transaction costs and paid apps | Moderate, within the limits the platform sets | The better fit when the team wants to run the shop without technical help |
| Wix | Small businesses already committed to Wix | Monthly platform fee | Moderate, with fewer options for custom structure | We support existing Wix sites; for a new build we normally recommend WordPress |
If you are unsure which route fits, book a 20 minute discovery call. We will tell you plainly, including when the answer is a smaller project than you expected.
Sector experience across public bodies, tourism, legal firms and retail
Four sectors bring us repeated work in Northern Ireland, and each has requirements that a general brief tends to miss. The sections below cover what changes in the build for each one.
Public sector and third sector websites
Public sector websites in Northern Ireland must meet the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018, which apply across the UK and are measured against WCAG 2.2 at level AA. The GOV.UK guidance on equality and accessibility regulations also requires a published accessibility statement, and here the wider duty to disabled users sits under the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 rather than the Equality Act. In practice that means accessibility testing during the build, templates that editors cannot easily break, and an accessibility statement written before launch rather than afterwards.
Councils, arm’s length bodies and funded organisations also buy differently. Most work arrives through a quotation or tender with a written specification, fixed approval routes and a requirement to report on delivery, and we price and plan with that in mind. The same applies to the voluntary and community sector, where Development Trusts NI is one of the regional networks whose website we have helped redevelop.
Tourism and hospitality websites
Tourism sites in Northern Ireland sell to two currencies and two sets of search habits, because a hotel in Fermanagh or a visitor attraction on the north coast often sells to visitors from the Republic and Great Britain as well as to local customers. The build therefore needs euro and sterling pricing that is clear on every booking page,
mobile pages that load quickly on a weak rural signal, and a direct booking route that links cleanly to the reservation system the business already uses. Seasonal content matters too, since an events page that is out of date by March costs bookings in the summer. We also run ConnollyCove, a travel publication, so we know from our own analytics how visitors research a trip before they book one.
Solicitor and law firm websites
Law firm websites need one page per practice area, written so that a person searching for a conveyancing solicitor in Newry or a family law solicitor in Belfast lands on the page that answers that need. Many Northern Ireland practices also act for clients in the Republic, which affects how fees, offices and jurisdictions are described. Publicity by solicitors here is governed by the Law Society of Northern Ireland, so we ask the firm to confirm its own position on testimonials and fee wording before those pages are written. Enquiry forms are built to collect only what the firm needs for a first conflict check, which keeps the data held to a minimum.
Ecommerce and retail websites
Retailers in Northern Ireland face trading rules that do not apply anywhere else in the UK, which we cover in the next section. A typical retail build includes the product catalogue, payment and delivery set-up, VAT by destination, customer accounts and training for the staff who will run the shop day to day. The review from a Northern Ireland retail business further down this page describes one of those projects.
What web design in Northern Ireland costs
Very few agencies here publish prices, which makes quotes hard to compare. The figures below are the starting points we use, and every project is quoted individually after discovery against a written scope. For a closer look at packages, see our page on web design packages and pricing in Belfast, and for UK-wide figures our breakdown of website design costs in the UK.
| Project type | What it includes | Indicative investment | Typical timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brochure website | Custom design, up to 10 pages, responsive build, contact forms, technical SEO set-up and editor training | £2,000 to £3,500 | 8 to 12 weeks |
| Small business website with content | As above, plus copywriting, keyword research, service and location pages and Google Business Profile alignment | £3,500 to £6,000 | 10 to 14 weeks |
| Ecommerce build | Product catalogue, payments, shipping and tax configuration, customer accounts and staff training | From £6,000 | 12 to 16 weeks |
| Custom or integrated build | Bespoke functionality, third-party integrations, booking or membership systems and cross-border requirements | From £10,000, quoted on scope | Quoted on scope |
What moves the price
The number of unique page templates has more effect on cost than the number of pages, because each template has to be designed, built and tested. Functionality comes next, since a booking engine, a members’ area or a link to your accounting software is development work. Accessibility testing to public sector standards adds genuine effort, and so does content, depending on whether copy, photography and product data come from you or from us.
Build quotes include design, development, technical SEO set-up, testing, launch and a handover session. Domain registration, hosting and support, photography, video and ongoing marketing are quoted separately so that you can see what each part costs. If budget is tight, reducing the number of templates and supplying your own copy will bring the figure down faster than cutting pages.
Selling on both sides of the border changes the build
Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK with a land border, and for most businesses that border is part of daily trade. A construction supplier in Newry serves clients in both jurisdictions, and a retailer in Derry and Londonderry can sell to Donegal as easily as to Coleraine. That dual audience affects currency display, VAT labelling, telephone number formats and the place names a customer expects to see.
For businesses selling goods, the Windsor Framework adds a further layer, because goods trade with EU customers generally follows EU VAT rules and uses an XI-prefixed VAT number while services follow UK rules. Your accountant confirms the treatment for your business, and we build the checkout, pricing and invoices to match. Planning this into the content structure and the technical set-up from the start costs far less than correcting it after launch.
Funding and business support
Northern Ireland has business support that does not exist in Great Britain. Go Succeed is delivered by the 11 councils and offers mentoring, masterclasses and access to grant funding, and ProfileTree has delivered Go Succeed mentoring on websites, SEO and digital marketing for businesses referred through councils including Belfast, Lisburn and Castlereagh, and Mid and East Antrim.
The Digital Transformation Flexible Fund is separate. It offers grants of £5,000 to £20,000 covering up to 70% of eligible project costs for small and micro businesses that invest in advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things or big data, and the project has to change how the business operates rather than simply digitise what it already does. A standard brochure site is unlikely to qualify on its own, although a build that includes system integration or bespoke development might. Funding opens in calls, so check the current position before you commit budget, and we can help you define the technical scope for an application.
How people search here
Buyers search for suppliers in Ballymena, Omagh, Bangor and Coleraine as well as Belfast, and some terms that look logical carry almost no search volume in Northern Ireland. Good web design work here therefore includes a Google Business Profile set up for the right service areas and location content that says something real about each town. Our SEO services for Northern Ireland cover this in depth.
Why Northern Ireland businesses choose ProfileTree
When you compare web design companies in Northern Ireland, ask who writes the copy, who films the video and who handles search after launch. At ProfileTree the answer to all of those is the same team, working from the McSweeney Centre at 31 Henry Place, Belfast BT15 2AY, where you are welcome to visit.
Design, development, copywriting, video, animation and SEO are all in-house, and nothing is passed to a subcontractor you never meet. We also run our own publications, including LearningMole and ConnollyCove, so the methods we recommend to clients are the ones we use on sites we own. Our experience of council-funded mentoring means we know how support schemes work in practice, and many clients have stayed with us for several years as their sites have grown.
Ciaran Connolly, founder of ProfileTree, describes the approach this way: “We built ProfileTree’s own online presence using the same methods we apply for clients. That means we can show exactly what we do, how it works, and what results to expect, rather than asking clients to take our word for it.”
Every project follows six stages from discovery to handover
Durations are confirmed against your project when we quote. The most common cause of delay is content arriving late, so we agree who is writing what before any design work begins.
- Discovery and brief: a structured video call of 45 to 90 minutes covers objectives, audience, budget, internal resources and approval routes, and complex projects receive a written brief for sign-off.
- Architecture and content plan: we map the site structure, agree the page list and confirm which copy you supply, and you receive content templates with agreed dates so material arrives in a usable format.
- Design: concepts are shared by screen share or as annotated PDFs, starting with the key templates, because approving a pattern is quicker than approving every page.
- Build on staging: development happens on a staging site you can open in any browser, and heading structure, page speed, mobile layout and internal linking are handled at this stage rather than added later.
- Review and testing: you receive a review checklist and give consolidated feedback in rounds, while we run cross-browser, cross-device, form and accessibility tests in parallel.
- Launch and handover: we update DNS, migrate hosting where needed, run final SEO checks, apply the redirect map on rebuilds and walk your team through the editor.
After launch, the site keeps improving
A site that is left untouched after launch loses ground to competitors who keep improving theirs. Support clients receive technical maintenance, security updates, performance monitoring and content changes, and we can also train in-house teams to manage content and basic on-page SEO through our digital training, which is usually cheaper than buying agency hours for routine edits.
Technical SEO is built in from the first template, because heading hierarchy, URL structure, internal linking and page speed are build decisions that cost more to fix later. Video is produced by our video production team in Belfast, who work on the same projects as the web team, so product films and premises footage can be scheduled alongside the build.
Buyers increasingly ask an AI assistant to shortlist suppliers before they open a search engine. Being named in those answers depends on clear entity information, unambiguous statements about services and locations, structured answers to real questions, and consistency between your site and your profiles elsewhere. Our work on AI SEO for Northern Ireland businesses covers this.
What clients say about our web design work
The best evidence of how a project will go is how it went for others. These three reviews come from organisations that commissioned new builds or redesigns, and they are reproduced as written.
Website redesign for a retail business across Northern Ireland
The marketing team at iPhix Tech NI wrote: “We approached ProfileTree for a complete website redesign and development project after our old site was underperforming. As a retail business operating across Northern Ireland, we knew our site needed to reflect both our brand and the customer journey properly… The new site is fast, mobile-responsive, and clearly designed with SEO in mind. The layout guides users naturally toward making enquiries and bookings, which is exactly what we needed… We’re now seeing a steady increase in traffic and a big improvement in user engagement. The best part? Local customers in Belfast and Newry are finding us more easily thanks to the search optimisation baked into the site.”
Custom website design and build with ongoing support
Lisa O’Donnell wrote: “From beginning to end, the team at Profile Tree were just fantastic. We were complete novices but nothing was ever any trouble for the team… We were helped with choosing a concept design for our website, given detailed help, updates, and feedback on our initial choices and throughout the build process. We are absolutely delighted with the final product and love the team and their work so much, we will continue to use them moving forward for the upkeep of the site.”
Third sector website redevelopment in Northern Ireland
Margaret Craig of Development Trusts NI wrote: “We had the pleasure of collaborating with Marcus from ProfileTree to support the redevelopment of our website at Development Trusts NI. Marcus brought an exceptional level of developer knowledge to the project, seamlessly complementing our in-house expertise in UX design. His ability to understand our needs and translate them into effective web solutions was invaluable.”
Each client started from a different place: a retailer with an underperforming site, first-time buyers who wanted guidance at every step, and a regional network with its own UX expertise. In each case we listened before designing, explained decisions in plain English and built search visibility in from the first template.
We work in every county in Northern Ireland
A client in Strabane gets the same process as a client ten minutes from our office, because we work remotely as standard. We run projects in Belfast, Lisburn, Bangor, Newtownards and Antrim in the greater Belfast area; Derry and Londonderry, Coleraine and Ballymena in the north and north-west; Newry, Armagh and Banbridge in the south; and Omagh, Enniskillen and Dungannon in the west and mid-Ulster, as well as businesses in the border counties. Belfast-area clients can meet in person if they prefer, but the project does not depend on it. Several towns have their own pages with local detail, including web design in Derry, web design in Lisburn, web design in Newry and web design in Omagh.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does a website cost in Northern Ireland?
A brochure website with us starts at £2,000 and a small business site with copywriting and location pages typically falls between £3,500 and £6,000. Ecommerce builds start at £6,000 and custom or integrated builds at £10,000. The figure depends on the number of unique templates, the functionality required, who supplies the content and whether the site must meet public sector accessibility standards. We quote a fixed price against a written scope after a discovery call, so the figure you approve is the figure you pay unless the scope itself changes. Hosting, photography, video and ongoing marketing are quoted separately.
How long does a web design project take?
A standard brochure website takes eight to twelve weeks from the kickoff call, provided content arrives on the agreed dates. A site with copywriting and location pages usually takes ten to fourteen weeks, and ecommerce builds twelve to sixteen. Custom builds are scheduled once the scope is agreed. The most common cause of delay is content, which is why the second stage of every project fixes who is writing each page and by when. If you have a hard deadline, such as a product launch or the start of a funding period, tell us at the first call and we will plan backwards from it.
Will a redesign affect my Google rankings?
Rankings usually move a little after a migration and then settle, provided the redirects are mapped properly. Before any design work we audit the current site to find the pages that earn traffic and enquiries, keep those URLs where we can, and map a 301 redirect for every address that changes. After launch we monitor Search Console for crawl errors and ranking movement and correct problems as they appear. The sites that lose rankings in a redesign are usually the ones where nobody listed the old URLs before the new site went live.
Can you build a site for customers in Northern Ireland and the Republic?
Yes, sterling and euro pricing, VAT display by destination, telephone formats and location-specific content are all planned into the build from the start. For businesses selling goods, the checkout and invoices are configured to match the VAT treatment your accountant confirms under the Windsor Framework. Content can also address customers in both jurisdictions on the same page or on separate pages, depending on how different the offer is on each side of the border.
Can Northern Ireland businesses get grants for a website?
Go Succeed offers council-led mentoring, masterclasses and access to grant funding, and the Digital Transformation Flexible Fund offers capital grants of £5,000 to £20,000 covering up to 70% of eligible costs for advanced technology projects. A standard brochure website is unlikely to qualify for the fund on its own, because the project must change how the business operates. A build that includes system integration or bespoke development has a better chance. Funding opens in calls, so check the current terms before committing budget, and we can help define the technical scope for an application.
Should I hire a freelance web designer or an agency?
A freelancer can suit a small, simple site where one person can cover the design, the build and the content. An agency makes more sense when you need design, copy, SEO, video and ongoing support from one accountable team, or when the site has to meet accessibility or procurement requirements. The practical questions are who will update the site in a year, who will fix it if it breaks during a holiday, and who is responsible if it does not produce enquiries.
Is WordPress still the right platform for a small business website?
For businesses that plan to publish content and add pages over time, WordPress remains our default, because it gives full control over structure, has no licence fee and can be managed by your own team. Shopify can suit a retailer who wants a simpler back office, and we support existing Wix sites, as the platform table above shows. The right choice depends on how the site will be run after handover rather than on the platform’s popularity.
About the author
Ciaran Connolly is the founder and director of ProfileTree, which he started in Belfast in 2011. He led ProfileTree’s work with Derry City and Strabane District Council on the Derry Halloween website and sponsorship. Read Ciaran’s profile.
ProfileTree is a Belfast web design and digital marketing agency, founded in 2011 and based at the McSweeney Centre. ProfileTree Web Design and Digital Marketing, McSweeney Centre, 31 Henry Place, Belfast BT15 2AY. Telephone: 028 9568 0364. Email:hello@profiletree.com