Your Notting Hill business deserves the modern-stack version, not another WordPress install

Notting Hill is the small slice of West London where I both work and live. The studio is at Office 77, 22 Notting Hill Gate. After running Seahawk Media for nine years and shipping 12,000-plus sites globally, the W11 brief is the one I find most interesting in 2026 — small enough to be in person when it matters, big enough that the businesses here have real budgets and real ambitions.

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

• Boutique brands and agencies on Westbourne Grove or Portobello who need a site that converts as well as the storefront does
• Founders running a SaaS, fintech, or consumer brand from the W11 / W2 / W11 / W10 cluster who outgrew their first WordPress build
• Established Notting Hill businesses (clinics, restaurants, design studios, family offices) running a tired site that has not been touched in three years

If your business in W11 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 Notting Hill 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 Notting Hill 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.

A few hyperlocal notes that matter for a Notting Hill engagement specifically. The studio is a five-minute walk from Hermanos at 127 Portobello (where I run most of my Tuesday discovery calls), three minutes from the Notting Hill Bookshop, and ten minutes from Westbourne Grove and Ladbroke Grove. The kickoff often happens at one of those — Sunday in Brooklyn or Beam for proper sit-down sessions, Hermanos for a 30-minute call.

For Notting Hill businesses specifically, the in-person factor is the thing that most distant-team agencies cannot match. The first design review happens at the studio with the actual designs on a screen and the actual stakeholders in the room. The post-launch retrospective happens face-to-face. The day-after-launch fire drill happens in person if it has to. That is the Notting Hill differentiator.

If you want a sense of how I think about the area beyond just the work — the breakfast spots I actually go back to in W11 is the most-read personal post on the site, and gives you a feel for the kind of operator the engagement will run with.

Do you offer web design in Notting Hill?

Yes. The studio is at 22 Notting Hill Gate, so Notting Hill is essentially the home turf. 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 Notting Hill 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 Notting Hill 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.