Built by one
developer who
reads every line.
I’m Stephen Evans. I’ve shipped more than forty bespoke sites since 2022, plus a WordPress plugin with paying users and a CRM I built, ran and eventually retired. Kestrel is where that work happens now: web design and development for businesses in Crowborough and across East Sussex.
Client sites, live now
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Things I built for myself
Three products, one retired
Townsmith: Local Pages Engine
Builds a whole matrix of service-area pages from one blueprint, scores each out of 100, and refuses to publish the thin ones. I wrote it because AI made it trivial to churn out doorway pages, and Google now punishes exactly that.
Cartback
Recovers abandoned carts with honest nudges. No fake countdowns, no invented scarcity, and every recovered pound tied back to a real order.
SoloCRM
A CRM for small businesses. I did the product, the onboarding and the support, then shut it down. Knowing when to retire something is the part client work never teaches you.
What you can hire me for
Six things. Anything outside them I’ll tell you honestly and point you somewhere better.
Bespoke design & build
Designed for your business rather than adapted from a theme. WordPress when you need to edit it yourself, Next.js when it needs to fly.
WordPress & WooCommerce
Custom themes and blocks your team can actually use, with the plugin count kept deliberately low so nothing breaks on a Tuesday.
Web apps & custom software
Portals, booking systems, internal tools. I've run my own SaaS, so I'll be straight with you about what year two costs to maintain.
Speed rescue
A fixed-fee Core Web Vitals audit with a prioritised fix list you can hand to anyone. Or I do the fixing.
SEO & AI search visibility
Structured data, answer-first pages, entity consistency. The work that decides whether an AI assistant names you or your competitor.
Care plans
Hosting, updates, backups, monitoring, and a monthly allowance of changes. You email one person and that person answers.
Ranking first is no longer the same job as being recommended.
Research from Brandlight found the overlap between the top Google links and the sources AI assistants actually cite has fallen from around 70% to under 20%. You can hold position one and still be invisible the moment a customer asks ChatGPT who to use.
So I build for both, on every project, at no extra charge. Structured data in the head, answers before arguments, and a site that says the same thing about you as your Google Business Profile does.
Machine-readable facts
01LocalBusiness, Service, Person, FAQPage and Offer markup in JSON-LD, so engines read facts rather than guess at them. Google says it is not required for AI answers and I will not pretend otherwise. It is still what Bing parses, and Bing is what ChatGPT reads.
Answer first, evidence after
02The Princeton study that named this discipline measured up to 40% more visibility from adding quotes, statistics and cited sources. Your pages get written that way.
Crawl access, checked
03Plenty of sites block the crawlers they want. Cloudflare now does it by default. I read your logs for OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot and set robots.txt on purpose.
Local entity consistency
04Vendor studies put your Google Business Profile at roughly a third of local ranking weight. One mismatched address fragments the lot, so the site and the profile get lined up.
And the honest caveat: I’ll ship an llms.txt if you want one, but Google has said on the record it doesn’t use them. It isn’t a ranking lever and I won’t bill it as one.
The long way round, which turned out to be the useful way.
I started by volunteering at an IT centre in Uckfield, teaching people how to use their own laptops and phones, and looking after the centre’s website. Then technology sales at John Lewis, where you learn quickly that nobody cares how clever a thing is if they can’t work it.
I taught myself to code properly, became the main developer at a Sussex web studio, and spent four years owning whole builds end to end. Kestrel is that same work, direct, with nothing in between.
PHP, Laravel, Node, MySQL
WordPress, WooCommerce, Shopify
Claude & Claude Code, reviewed and secured
Wealden District Council
Community Heroes 2018, Young Achiever nominee
BBC Sussex & Surrey
Prices, in public.
Fixed and scoped before we start. If your job doesn’t fit a number below, I’ll tell you what it does cost in the first reply.
- Bespoke design, no theme
- WordPress you can edit
- Technical SEO and JSON-LD
- Enquiry form and analytics
- Everything in Launch
- Copy structured for AI answers
- Service and location pages
- Core Web Vitals guarantee
- Google Business Profile setup
- Two rounds of revisions
- WooCommerce or Shopify
- Portals, booking, dashboards
- Integrations and migrations
- Built by someone who ran a SaaS
Four questions, then a real answer.
No form-filling marathon. Tell me the shape of the job and I’ll come back inside one working day with a price range and the two or three things I’d need to know to firm it up.
If I’m not the right person, I’ll say so in that same reply.
What do you need building?
This page, measured in your browser
Your deviceReal numbers from your device and connection, not a screenshot of a score I chose. Nothing is sent anywhere. The measurement happens in your browser and stays there. If one of these ever reads amber on my own site, you will see it, which is rather the point. I audit these for £650.