A photo studio that learned to build websites

How we got here

The studio came first. Passport photos, portraits, prints, photo gifts — a shop on Lower Road with a counter and a queue. Like most small businesses, it needed a website that could take bookings, and like most small businesses, what it got the first time round was slow, hard to change and impossible to find in search.

So we built it ourselves, then the booking system behind it, then the order and invoicing system that still runs the studio today. Other businesses on the street saw it working and asked. That is genuinely the whole origin story: we are not a marketing agency that discovered local business, we are a local business that had to learn this to survive and then got asked to do it for the neighbours.

What that means for your project

We have been the client. We know what it is like to be quoted for a website by someone who will not explain what any of it is for, to pay a monthly fee for marketing with no way of telling whether it is working, and to be told a rebuild will take six weeks and then wait five months.

• A fixed price before work starts. A written plan, a timeline and a number. No hourly creep.
• Plain English. If we cannot explain why something is worth paying for, you should not pay for it.
• An honest no. We will tell you when ads are the wrong answer, when your existing site is worth repairing rather than replacing, and when the free half of local SEO is all you actually need.
• You own everything. The design, the content, the domain and the accounts. You can leave whenever you like and take it all with you.

Local, in the literal sense

Search for a web designer in Surrey Quays and most of what comes back is agencies in other counties running a page for every postcode in Britain. There is nothing illegal about it, but they cannot meet you on Tuesday, they have never walked down Lower Road, and they do not know that Surrey Quays, Canada Water, Rotherhithe are four different markets rather than one.

We are at 142 Lower Road, London SE16 2UG. You can walk in. We work across 13 areas of London and each one has its own page, written about that place.

The legal bit

SQ Creative Media London is a trading name of Surrey Quays Photo Studio Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 16218366. Registered office: 142 Lower Road, London SE16 2UG. You can look us up at Companies House — we would rather you did.