Free website audit · a plan and a fair price built around your business · no lock-in

Free audit · a plan built for you · no lock-in

Run a free audit →
UK Web Marketing Run a free audit

Founder & CTO, UK Web Marketing

Jordan Gilbert, the person who builds your site.

I have been building websites for over 20 years, since primary school in 2006, and I have now expertly built live UK local-business sites: takeaways, barbers, garages, salons, builders, clinics. Every one expertly built, never a template.

I trained as an architectural engineer at Loughborough and I bring that same discipline to the web: plan the structure first, build it properly, keep it fast. When you message UK Web Marketing you get me, and one accountable point of contact, not an account manager and not a call centre.

Get in touch About the company →
Portrait of Jordan Gilbert, founder and CTO of UK Web Marketing
Jordan Gilbert Founder & CTO, UK Web Marketing
  • 20+ years Building websites, since 2006
  • Expertly built Live UK local-business sites, built and run
  • Expertly built Never templates
  • One contact Direct support, not a call centre

Academic & technical foundation

Engineering at Loughborough; architectural imagination via HarvardX.

Two things sit behind the way I build: a four-year engineering degree, and an online course from Harvard’s design school. Both are verifiable, and I am careful to describe each one exactly as it is.

BSc (Hons) · Loughborough University

Architectural Engineering & Design Management

A four-year BSc (Hons) with an industrial placement year. Focus: architectural design development, computational and parametric modelling workflows, integrated engineering and construction management, interdisciplinary collaboration, and BIM-driven common data environments.

Studied within the School of Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering, ranked 1st for Building in the Complete University Guide 2027. See the ranking →

HarvardX online course · Harvard University Graduate School of Design

The Architectural Imagination

A HarvardX online course produced by Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design: architectural theory, spatial reasoning, and conceptual design frameworks. Instructor: K. Michael Hays. Completed with a Verified Certificate, an online-course certificate, not a Harvard degree.

Verify the certificate →

Every qualification, and the ones I am currently working towards, is set out in full on the credentials page.

How I build

Built properly, fast, and easy to look after.

The way I build comes down to three plain things: a site that is solid underneath, loads fast on a phone, and keeps working without a pile of plugins to go wrong.

  1. Built right from the ground up

    I plan how a site fits together before I make it look nice, so it is solid underneath, not just a pretty front with problems hiding behind it.

  2. Fast, because slow loses customers

    Every site is built to load in well under a second on a phone. A slow site is a customer who has already tapped back to Google.

  3. Simple, so there is less to break

    Expertly built, with no pile of plugins to go wrong. Fewer moving parts means a site that keeps working and stays easy to look after.

How I got here

Weebly → Wix → WordPress → systems over tools.

Twenty years of building, and a steady progression toward control, performance, and architectural clarity.

Early work

Weebly, then Wix

My first exposure to building on the web came through Weebly in school, then Wix. The defining constraint was speed: reducing the gap between an idea and a live page to near zero. That constraint shaped my approach more than any single tool.

Sixth form

WordPress, scale without structure

By sixth form I was building WordPress sites for small organisations and personal projects. It scaled quickly, but it introduced structural fragility: plugin dependency, theme coupling, and unpredictable maintenance overhead. The sites worked, but I did not truly own how they were put together.

University

Systems over tools

At Loughborough I returned to fundamentals: HTML, CSS and JavaScript from first principles. That reframed the web as a system of constraints rather than a set of platforms. From there I moved into modern frameworks (React, Next.js, Astro), chosen not for trend but for architectural control and performance.

Today

Built properly, run for you

Everything I have learned now goes into UK Web Marketing: expertly built sites with no plugin sprawl, business email set up properly, bookings and payments on your own site, and one accountable point of contact. The craft is the same discipline, applied to a real UK small business.

Frameworks I have published

Named methodologies, written down and citable.

Not just opinions: the repeatable thinking I apply, written up in the open.

The Local SEO Six

The six basics that decide whether a UK small business shows up on Google Maps and the Local Pack: a claimed Google Business Profile, LocalBusiness schema on every service page, address and postcode as text, one indexed page per service, LCP under one second on mobile, and HTTPS plus a mobile-first build.

Read the framework →

The Five-Point Small-Business Website Test

The five qualities a small-business website needs to work at all: fast, mobile-first, clear, one next step, and findable. None require a four-figure agency build.

Read the framework →

The 0.05-Second Test

Three pass/fail criteria a visitor's brain judges in the first 50 milliseconds: did the page actually load, does it look professional, and is it for me. Most small-business sites fail the first because the page has not loaded yet.

Read the framework →

The Audit-Led Model

UK Web Marketing's three-step pricing path: a free audit that tells you where you stand, a paid Marketing and Automation Deep-Dive credited in full against any build, then a bespoke build plus ongoing website management from £49 a month, quoted to your business, with no lock-in.

Read the framework →

The Wix Decision Tree

Three questions decide whether to stay on Wix or move off it: does most of your work come from Google search or local maps, would the website influence a customer choosing between you and a competitor, and do you want to spend zero hours a month maintaining the site. Answer yes to all three and you are losing calls on Wix.

Read the framework →

The Build Order

Build a UK SMB site in the order an engineer lays a building: URL graph first, render contract second, content model third, components fourth, visuals last. The order is non-negotiable, and the cost of getting it wrong is roughly six weeks of rework per redesign.

Read the framework →

The Six-Channel IMC Stack

Every UK SMB needs all six of these channels somewhere in the mix. Paid search is not on the list; it is a short-term insertion into channels 1 and 5, never a substitute for either.

Read the framework →

The No-Show Maths

The simple sum every barbershop booking decision should be run through: an empty chair is pure lost margin, you cannot win the time back, and the single biggest lever against no-shows is a card on file.

Read the framework →

The Local Visibility Stack

The five layers, worked best in order, that decide whether a UK barbershop shows up in Google Maps and local results, a fully-completed Google Business Profile, review velocity with owner responses, consistent NAP, a fast mobile website, and fresh photos and posts.

Read the framework →

The Four Accessibility Failure Modes

The four points on which almost every non-compliant UK small-business site fails: keyboard and visible focus, colour contrast, missing text alternatives and labels, and broken structure. They map almost one-to-one onto the most-failed WCAG 2.2 success criteria, and a site failing any two is unlikely to clear the reasonable-adjustments bar.

Read the framework →

The Five Jobs of a Barbershop Website

The five jobs every barbershop website must do, get the customer booked, be found on Google, show the work, show prices/hours/location plainly, and build trust. If a feature does not serve one of the five, it is decoration.

Read the framework →

The 10-item checklist

The ten distinct operational items a real done-for-you UK website service runs every month. If a provider cannot show you the list, or tell you which items are in scope and which are extras, they are selling a build with a maintenance retainer bolted on.

Read the framework →

The Four Citability Gaps

The four reasons a UK small-business page never gets cited in Google's AI Overviews: no clear machine-readable answers, thin entity and E-E-A-T signals, answers buried instead of stated up front, and stale, slow pages. Close any two and you are already a more quotable source than most local competitors.

Read the framework →

The Small-Business Website Checklist

The twelve-point audit checklist we run on every new client's existing site, covering Core Web Vitals, mobile-first build, hero clarity, one call to action, click-to-call, address markup, per-service pages, schema, hours and area, HTTPS and real testimonials, GDPR-friendly hosting, and Google Business Profile. If a site fails any three, it is leaking customers rather than winning them.

Read the framework →

The Three-Year Cost Curve

Every realistic website-build option has five cost lines that compound differently over 36 months. Lines four and five, your time and lost customers, are the dominant ones for most UK small businesses and the ones every other pricing page skips.

Read the framework →

The Seven Signals

Seven signals, run in order against a shortlist, that separate a real UK website maintenance subscription from a payment plan with a service wrapper. Any single walk is enough; pass all seven and you have an operationally serious managed website service.

Read the framework →

The Visibility Ladder

Four stages of website investment, matched not to page count but to how much visibility and growth work you want done for you: exist properly, convert visitors, grow, and dominate your local market. The infrastructure and the accountable point of contact stay the same at every stage.

Read the framework →

Shoot once, cut into many

A simple weekly content workflow for a busy owner: batch one short session a week, then turn the same photos and clips into many graphics and videos rather than making something fresh every day.

Read the framework →

The Rent or Own Test

A three-question test for any online channel a business depends on: who controls the reach, who holds the customer and the data, and who can switch it off. If the answer is the platform, you are renting. Rented channels are worth using, but every rented channel should point at one you own.

Read the framework →

The Four Jobs

The four jobs, in order, that make an AI citation likely, plus a fifth that tells you whether the first four are working. They are the same fundamentals that make a page good for a human searcher.

Read the framework →

The five factors that actually decide the timeline

Five factors decide how long a website takes to build, and only one of them is the actual building: scope, content readiness, integrations, revisions, and the client bottleneck.

Read the framework →

The 3-2-1 Backup Rule

Keep three copies of anything you cannot lose, on two different types of storage, with one copy held off-site, then prove it works with an annual restore test. The off-site copy is what survives theft, fire and ransomware; the restore test is what turns a hope into a backup.

Read the framework →

The Six Honest Signs You Need a Redesign

The six signs a UK small business genuinely needs a full redesign rather than a cheaper refresh or maintenance. The rule that matters more than any single sign is to count how many are true: one is almost always a fix, three or more at once means the foundations have failed.

Read the framework →

The Lockdown Order

A five-step, order-of-impact sequence for securing a UK small business: a password manager first, two-factor authentication on every account that touches money, encrypted email for sensitive correspondence, a VPN on networks you do not control, and encrypted storage for client files.

Read the framework →

The Four Places Leads Leak

More leads is rarely a traffic problem; it is a leak problem. Leads escape in four places, and a proper lead-generation system closes each one in turn.

Read the framework →

The Sovereignty-by-Design Test

A five-part test for whether a UK small business's data posture is genuinely EU-sovereign rather than accidentally exposed to US jurisdiction: providers whose corporate home is in the EEA or UK, region pinning made explicit in configuration, no US-resident software on the critical path for identifying personal data, a written and disclosed sub-processor list, and a Data Processing Agreement with each supplier plus notice before the mix changes.

Read the framework →

The Profile Flywheel

The four-stage cycle that makes a Google Business Profile compound: Complete (every field filled, correct primary category), Active (fresh photos, posts and answered questions), Trusted (a steady rhythm of honest reviews with replies), and Measured (the profile's own performance data deciding what you do more of). Each stage feeds the next; a profile that stops at Complete stalls.

Read the framework →

The Seven Conversion Levers

The seven levers that decide whether a UK small-business website turns visitors into enquiries: above-the-fold clarity, one clear next step, trust signals, form friction, speed-to-lead, mobile call-first design, and honest measurement. Work them in order; the early levers are cheap and the late ones are wasted without them.

Read the framework →

The Proof-of-Work Loop

A repeatable habit for tradespeople: every finished job produces three marketing assets, a photo of the work, a review request while the customer is happiest, and a location signal for the area it was done in. Run the loop on every job and your Google presence compounds without a marketing budget.

Read the framework →

The Four Levers on Cost-Per-Customer

What it costs to win a customer is one number, marketing spend divided by customers won, and four levers move it. One: bring enquiries in free through local search instead of buying every click. Two: convert more of the visitors you already have with a faster, clearer site. Three: follow up every lead so you stop paying twice for the same person. Four: keep the customers you won, because the cheapest customer is the one who comes back.

Read the framework →

What I operate

Two systems in parallel.

One registered company behind both, so the software your business runs on and the people who build your site are the same accountable team.

  1. TicketWave HQ Ltd

    The UK-registered company that runs the booking, ordering and ticketing module local businesses plug into their own site, so they own the customer, not a marketplace. It is the same company that operates UK Web Marketing.

    Verify on Companies House →

  2. UK Web Marketing

    Where we build and run the whole online setup for local UK businesses: website, email, bookings, reviews and Google, on one bill, with a small bench of trusted UK specialists on the bigger jobs.

    Read more about the company →
The sites I have built → What I write → My code on GitHub →

Talk directly

One accountable point of contact. Direct support.

The fastest way to reach me is email, with a same-hour reply during working time. Or read about the company side at /about.

Get in touch About the company →

Verifiable. HarvardX online-course Verified Certificate · edX certificate → · Companies House: TicketWave HQ Ltd # 17143167 →

Free audit · a plan built for you · no lock-in

Ready to find out exactly what your business needs?

Run a free audit