Ashford International is thirty-six to thirty-eight minutes from St Pancras on the high-speed line, and Canterbury West is fourteen minutes further up it. The train from my own town takes over an hour. So a London studio can be in an Ashford boardroom before I have finished driving there, and the whole length of Kent sits inside London's selling range in a way that no part of East Sussex does. That is why a Kent business gets pitched by firms whose prices are set by what a Shoreditch client will pay, and why it often accepts them.
What I will not do is tell you what those firms would charge you, because I do not know and anybody quoting a competitor's rate card at you is guessing. What I will do is publish mine: £1,950 for up to five pages, £3,900 for ten to fifteen, £65 an hour with no minimum, no VAT at present. Compare fixed prices for a defined scope rather than day rates, because a low day rate spent badly is not cheap and a high one is not automatically waste. And note the figure does not move between Sevenoaks and Dover. There is no zone pricing on this site.
Sevenoaks, Tonbridge, Tunbridge Wells. Professional services, insurance and wealth management, private clinics, and trades working for households on London salaries. This buyer has usually read an agency proposal before and expects the process to look like one.
Denser, cheaper and much less London-facing. County administration sits in Maidstone, distribution sits off the M20 and M2, and a great many firms here trade across the whole county from a unit rather than from a high street anybody visits.
Orchards, hop gardens, packhouses and farm shops through the Medway valley and out towards Faversham. The Malling rootstock series, bred at East Malling from 1912, is still what much of the world grafts its apple trees onto. Businesses here are organised by variety and by picking window.
Chapel Down at Tenterden, Gusbourne at Appledore, Hush Heath at Staplehurst, Squerryes at Westerham. None of them is a client of mine. I have built for one wine tourism operator, in Sussex, and running tours is a different job from making the wine.
Dover handles well over two million lorries a year and the Eurotunnel terminal at Folkestone more than a million and a half more. Around them sit hauliers, customs agents, warehousing and cold storage, and a whole tier of firms whose busiest day is decided by the Channel rather than by them.
Margate, Ramsgate, Broadstairs, Whitstable, Deal, Folkestone. Independent hospitality, studios and makers, in towns whose visitor economy has changed markedly over the past fifteen years. This is the Kent I am furthest from and the Kent where a local developer is easiest to find.
West of Maidstone I come to you at the start, at no charge, because an hour standing in the place where the work happens saves a fortnight of email later. East of Ashford that hour costs three or four hours of driving, so it becomes a call, and you hear that from me before you book rather than after.
Not screenshots pasted into an email. A real URL you can open on your own phone, forward to a colleague in Canterbury or hand to whoever signs it off, updated as the build moves. Distance stops mattering the moment the work is a link rather than a meeting.
For anything at the far end of the county, a walkthrough recorded on your own finished site instead of a second drive to Thanet. You can play it again in November, which is when somebody actually needs to know how to add a page, and it does not depend on what either of us remembers from a meeting in June.
Coverage is a word this industry uses loosely, so here is mine. West of Maidstone I will sit in your office. East of Ashford I will not, and this site is not going to imply otherwise by listing thirty Kent towns in a footer. Where a page here names a place, it is because I could write something about that place you are able to check, which is a much smaller promise than a coverage map and the only one worth making.
The capacity limit is plainer still. I run two client builds at a time and there is nobody else here, so if you need three sites live at once I am the wrong answer, and if your procurement pack asks for headcount, indemnity tiers and certification I will not satisfy it. Against that, about half the sites I have built were built for people I never met, which is the honest case for hiring me from Dover. It is not the same thing as claiming Dover coverage.
None of this is an argument for choosing me over somebody in Canterbury. It is an argument for knowing which of the two you are choosing before you pay a deposit.
My address is in East Sussex and its postcode district is TN6. The TN area is named after Tonbridge, in Kent, and it stretches through Edenbridge, Cranbrook and Tenterden all the way out to Ashford, while Canterbury, Dover and Margate sit in CT, and Maidstone and Medway in ME. So Ashford shares a postcode area with my house and is still an hour away by road, and the postal geography that looks like a coverage map is nothing of the sort. Drive time is the only honest unit here, which is why the table above is in miles and minutes rather than in county names. It is also why Tunbridge Wells has a page that argues something else entirely from one end of that stretch of the A26, and Crowborough a third argument from the other, rather than three versions of this one with the nouns changed.
I have not built a customs declaration integration, a goods vehicle movement connection or a transport management system, and learning one on your invoice would be a poor deal for you. What the port corridor does generate is work I have done: quoting tools, customer portals, ordering that respects a loading window rather than a warehouse shelf, and one small thing that matters far more in this county than anywhere else. When the Channel backs up, Operation Brock puts a thirteen-mile contraflow on the M20 between junctions 8 and 9 and your phone starts ringing about whether today’s delivery is moving. A site where you can put an accurate notice across every page yourself, in two minutes, without ringing a developer, is worth more to a Kent haulier than most of the features that get sold instead. That is an editable component decided at build time, not a plugin bought afterwards, and it is the sort of thing web apps and custom software covers properly.
Because I could not write one worth reading, and I own the tool that would have told me so. My WordPress plugin scores a service-area page and blocks it below a threshold, and a page titled web design Ashford written from Crowborough would not clear it: no roads I could name, no trade mix I could describe, nothing a reader in Ashford could verify in ninety seconds. You can put a draft through the same scoring on the thin content checker and watch it refuse. The same test is worth applying to your own site if you serve the whole county, because Kent has hundreds of settlements and the temptation is a page for each: what usually works is proper service pages plus the three or four towns where you have genuinely done the work. One county page that admits its western bias is a truer claim than seven town pages that quietly do not.
The Sussex half of the same patch is web design in East Sussex, which argues something different because the county is different. If you want the mechanics rather than the geography, website design and build sets out what happens in each week of a build, and pricing lists every figure I charge, including the ones quoted above. If you are in the west of the county, the Tunbridge Wells page is more specific than this one, and vineyards and wineries goes considerably deeper than a county page can on tours, tastings and shipping bottles.
In the west, yes, at no charge. Tunbridge Wells is twenty minutes and Sevenoaks under thirty. Ashford, Canterbury, Thanet and Dover are an hour or more each way, so claiming in-person coverage there would be a promise I would quietly stop keeping. Those get a call and a preview link instead, and it makes no difference to the result.
Mostly because a lot of them come from agencies pricing against London overheads, and west Kent is close enough to London that this happens without anyone commenting on it. My prices are published and do not change by county. That is the practical argument for talking to somebody on the Sussex side of the border.
Tunbridge Wells properly, because it is my nearest large town and I am there regularly. The rest of west Kent reasonably. East Kent, honestly, no better than I know anywhere else in the country, and its economy is genuinely different: ports, logistics and coastal tourism rather than commuter professional services.
Kent, and it catches people out because it sits right on the border and its postcodes are shared with Sussex towns. Royal Tunbridge Wells is in Kent; Frant and Wadhurst, a few miles south, are in East Sussex. It matters for local search because the county is part of how a business is understood.
Real 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.