Web Design in Birmingham, AL

I am based in Birmingham, which means two things for you. The practical one is that we can meet in person if you would rather do this across a table than over a video call. The less obvious one is that Birmingham is the hardest local market in this metro to rank in, and I have spent a lot of time working out why.

Everybody wants to rank in Birmingham

Businesses all over this metro are trying to show up in Birmingham searches — Hoover, Mountain Brook, Vestavia Hills, Homewood, Trussville. They are separate municipalities, but they are close enough that their businesses genuinely serve Birmingham customers, and in my experience most of their websites say so.

So when you compete for a Birmingham search, you are not competing with the businesses inside the city limits. You are competing with everyone in the metro who has decided Birmingham is a market worth claiming — which is most of them.

That changes what works. In a small market you can rank by being the only business that bothered to build a decent website. In Birmingham you cannot. The bar is higher because the field is bigger.

Claiming a city is not the same as being relevant to it

The most common thing I see on a Birmingham business website is a list. Areas served: Birmingham, Hoover, Vestavia, Mountain Brook, Homewood, Alabaster, Pelham, Trussville. Sometimes a dozen towns, all in one paragraph in the footer.

That list does almost nothing. A page earns relevance to a search by answering it — by saying, in enough detail to be useful, what you do and where you do it — not by naming the place somewhere on the page. A footer that names twelve towns says the same thing as a footer that names none, because it does not tell anyone what you actually do in any of them.

What does work is unglamorous: one page that is genuinely about the thing someone searched for, saying what you do and where, in enough detail that it would be useful to a person even if search engines did not exist. That is harder than a list, which is exactly why it still works.

What actually moves you in a contested market

Three things, in the order I would tackle them.

Your Google Business Profile. For a lot of local searches, the map results sit above everything else and answer the question on the spot — a name, a rating, hours, a phone number. If you are not in there, a large share of the search never reaches your website at all. I have written a full guide to setting one up and keeping it useful, and it is the first thing I look at for any local business.

Your site's speed. This matters more in a competitive market than a quiet one, because you are being compared. A visitor who bounces off a slow page goes to the next result, and in Birmingham there is always a next result. Hand-coded sites are lean by construction — there is no page-builder engine to download before anything appears.

Pages that name what you do. Not a list of towns. Actual pages, one per service, each of them useful on its own. That is more work than a list and it is the work that separates the businesses that rank from the ones that wonder why they don't.

What I do

I build the site by hand, in clean HTML and CSS, designed around what your business actually does and who is trying to find you. On-page SEO is part of building it properly rather than an add-on: real page titles, real headings, structured data, a sitemap that reflects the site's real shape.

If your Google Business Profile needs work, I will tell you — and I will usually tell you to fix that first, because it is cheaper and faster than anything I could do to your website. You can read what I do on the local SEO side and how I build sites if you want the detail.

Most sites are finished in about a week. The bottleneck is almost always content — your text, your photos, your list of services. Monthly plans start at $150/month with a six-month minimum and include hosting, the domain, unlimited edits and support. A one-time build starts at $2,750 and you own it outright.

Meeting in person

This is the part that is genuinely different about working with someone in your own city. I can come to you, look at what you have on a real screen, and talk through it without scheduling a call. Some clients want that and some would rather never leave their desk — both are fine, and the work is the same either way.

I also work with businesses across the country who I have never met in person. Being local is a convenience, not a requirement. But if you would rather hire someone you can actually sit down with, that is a reasonable thing to want, and it is available here.

Where to start

Tell me what your business does and what is not working now. I will look at your site and your Google Business Profile and tell you what I would change — free, and with no pitch attached. If the honest answer is that you do not need a new website, I will say that instead.