Hammersmith creative and tech businesses deserve the modern-stack agency, not another WordPress shop

Hammersmith is a particular kind of brief. The businesses I work with here are not first-time-website territory. They are running real revenue, they have a brand they care about, and they have outgrown the WordPress install a freelancer set up for them in 2019. The business is in the creative-or-tech bracket, the brief is more sophisticated than a pure brochureware site, and the previous agency relationship ran out of steam.

Specifically, the Hammersmith-based clients I take on tend to fit one of these three shapes:

• Creative studios, post-production houses, and design-led brands operating in W6
• Tech and SaaS companies with offices in the Hammersmith / Fulham / Chiswick triangle
• Media, publishing, and broadcast businesses that need editorial-rich sites with serious performance budgets

If your business in W6 sits in any of those, the rest of this page describes how I actually deliver.

Three differentiators from the generic London agency route, none of which are visible on a typical agency homepage:

Modern stack, not WordPress-everything

I build on Next.js, Astro, and Supabase first. WordPress when the brief genuinely calls for it. The reason: most clients I take on have already done the WordPress route once and the second site needs to be ten times faster, ten times harder to hack, and not a plugin lottery. My take on WordPress alternatives is here, and the specific case for the modern-stack path is in the WordPress Stack Advisor — paste your URL and the tool walks through the right answer.

Personal brand, not an account manager chain

Most Hammersmith businesses have the agency-fatigue version of this story: kicked off with the founder, ended up with a junior account manager three weeks in. I am the senior on every engagement I take. Twelve thousand sites of practice across nine years, four global hubs at Seahawk Media, and the kickoff conversation is with me directly — not a sales chain.

Notting Hill office, in-person when it helps

The studio is at Office 77, 22 Notting Hill Gate. For Hammersmith clients, that is a ten to twenty-minute walk or a single tube stop. Most engagements run on Slack and Calendly, but I am genuinely close enough that we can meet in person for the parts where it matters — kickoff, design review, post-launch.

Three things to watch for in any London agency proposal that does not explicitly address them:

• Plugin sprawl on day one. If the proposal lists 20-plus plugins as the build approach, the security and performance posture is already broken before launch. Modern stack means fewer dependencies, not more.
• Designer-developer handoff with two account managers. The fastest engagements are the ones where the senior who scoped the work is the same one who codes the work. Most agencies cannot deliver that past employee five.
• No SEO transport plan for migrations. If you are moving off an existing site and the proposal does not mention redirect maps, Yoast or Rank Math metadata transport, or schema preservation — the migration will lose rankings. Every time.

My site migration playbook covers the SEO transport side specifically, and the WordPress to Next.js migration post is the technical detail.

Hammersmith briefs lean technical. The clients here often have in-house engineering capability and are looking for a partner who speaks the same stack — Next.js, TypeScript, headless CMS, structured data — rather than an agency that will hand them a 30-plugin WordPress install. The engagement is collaborative; the deliverables are code-shaped, the handover is real.

The studio is a 15-minute drive from Hammersmith Broadway, or one tube stop on the District Line from Notting Hill Gate. In-person work happens when the team is comfortable with it; otherwise async-first.

Do you offer web design in Hammersmith?

Yes. The studio is at 22 Notting Hill Gate, which is a short hop from Hammersmith. The engagements are run on Slack and video calls primarily; in-person kickoff and design reviews when they help. London-rate pricing in line with the kind of work — not the cheapest in the borough, not the most expensive.

What stack do you build on?

Next.js, Astro, and Supabase by default. Headless WordPress when the editorial team is already in wp-admin and the public site needs the modern stack. Sanity, Payload, Storyblok, or Strapi as the CMS layer when the brief calls for it. WordPress monolithic only when it is genuinely the right tool — small content sites, established editorial teams, no complex requirements.

How much does a Hammersmith website project cost?

Realistic ranges in 2026: £8,000 to £25,000 for a content-led marketing site with modern stack and SEO transport. £25,000 to £75,000 for a custom build with authenticated areas, dashboards, or programmatic SEO. £75,000 and up for ecommerce, multi-language, or 50,000-plus page directories. The first 30-minute call is the fastest way to get a real number for your specific brief.

Can you help with WordPress maintenance, not just new builds?

Yes. Managed care plans run from £200 to £2,000 a month depending on site size and SLA. The WordPress support service page covers the actual scope. London-based businesses get faster response windows because I genuinely live and work here.

Do you take on small projects?

It depends on the brief. Single-page landing pages and minor content updates are usually better placed with a freelancer or a smaller agency. Anything past 5 pages, anything involving migration, anything with structured data or programmatic content, anything with a real performance or security requirement — that is where I add the most value.

If you are running a business in Hammersmith and your website is the bottleneck — too slow, gets hacked, the editor team can't update it without breaking it, or the new design that was supposed to ship in March is still in Figma — the next 30 minutes is the fastest way to fix the diagnosis.

Book a 30-minute call from the button at the top of this page. No slide deck, no qualification screen. You describe the brief, I tell you whether I am the right person, and by the end of the call you have a stack pick, a price range, and a realistic timeline.