The launch of Lincoln Digital

For ten years I've been building websites for one very demanding client: me.

Since 2017 I've designed, coded and run more than forty of my own websites. Between them they get around 6.2 million page views a month. Nobody commissioned them. There was no brief, no budget and no deadline except the ones I set myself. If a site didn't work, it didn't get visitors, and I found out fast.

Today I'm doing something I've put off for years: opening that up to other people. Lincoln Digital is a web design and development company in Lincoln, and I do the work myself.

Ten years of learning the expensive way

Most of what I've built is public data, made usable. Sites that show NHS A&E waiting times, which NHS dentists are taking on new patients, hospital waiting lists, driving-test waits and bus timetables. Before those, a booking and appointment-reminder platform for clinics and salons.

They all have the same shape: messy data from hundreds of sources, kept up to date every day, and presented so an ordinary person can use it on a phone. Getting them found on Google was the whole game. That's how I learned SEO properly: by ranking things I'd built and living with the result.

Along the way I built my own tools, because the ones I could buy didn't tell me what I needed to know. A crawler and log-file analyser. A Search Console reporting tool. A guide to the Google ranking documents that leaked in 2024, which I've read more closely than is probably healthy.

I've done SEO for other businesses too, when the work was interesting: small firms, and larger names like Mozilla, the makers of Firefox, Fiverr and WikiJob. Some of the reviews from that work are on the About page.

For a good few years I was also one of the top-ranked members of SEOChat.com, the biggest SEO forum of its day, before it closed. A surprising amount of what I know came from arguing about it there.

Why I stopped keeping it to myself

Because I kept seeing the same thing.

Good Lincolnshire businesses with websites that were slow, built on templates, awkward to update and invisible on Google for the searches that actually bring in customers. Often paid for handsomely.

Businesses here deserve websites as good as the ones coming out of London and Manchester, and they shouldn't have to pay London prices to get them.

I'm in Lincoln, and most of the people I'll work with are within an hour of the city. I can come and see how a business really runs, meet the people who'll use the website, and understand what customers round here type into Google. That shows in the work, especially the local SEO.

How it works

There are no account managers. The person you talk to on the first call designs and builds your website, and answers the phone afterwards. That person is me.

• Fixed prices. One price for the agreed scope, before we start. If the scope changes, we talk about it before anything is billed.
• Designs in the browser. You see your website working on your own phone before the rest of it gets built.
• Hand-coded, not templated. Everything is written in C# and .NET because it's fast, secure and lasts. No page builders, no plugins to keep patching. Here's why.
• Fast pages. A one-second delay costs enquiries, so pages stay under a second, tested on real phones.
• You own everything. The code, the design, the domain and the content are yours from day one.
• Here after launch. Care plans, hosting and SEO from the same person who built the site.

I've also got a business degree, from Arden University. It's useful for the part of the job that's about your business rather than your website.

What I can do for you

Websites, designed from scratch and built to be fast. Online shops. Web apps and mobile apps. And SEO: technical, local and e-commerce, plus audits, penalty recovery and the harder end of the work, like medical and other YMYL sites. Prices are published on the prices page, because I'd want to know too.

Say hello

If you've got a website that isn't pulling its weight, or you're starting from nothing, get in touch or call 01522 253027. The first conversation is free, and I'll tell you honestly what I think, including if I'm not the right fit.

Thanks for reading. It's good to finally be open.