Is your website as good as your work?
If you’ve ever cringed before sending someone your own URL, you’ll know the two traps creative websites fall into. Some look stunning but are a pain to use. Others work perfectly well but could belong to any studio on the street.
We’ve spent nearly 20 years building for brands like adidas and Rizla, alongside media companies, design consultancies, and arts organisations. So our creative agency website design and development approach refuses to choose between the two:
They look like you. Layouts are built around your work, not a template’s idea of it, and editors can publish freely inside the design without breaking it.
They work for everyone. Accessible to WCAG AA, secure, and fast on a phone, so people can find your work and act on it.
A creative design agency website gets judged more than most
When you sell design, art, or media, your creative design agency website is your portfolio, your pitch, and your shop window all at once. When it’s neglected or confusing, it holds your business back:
- Years of articles, interviews, and case studies are online, but no one can find them
- Potential clients judge your creative work by a bland site that doesn’t look like it
- Your best work from this year isn’t on the site, because adding a case study means chasing the developer
- Showreels and galleries crawl on a phone, or the template squeezes everything into the same box
How we help
We design, build, and support specialist websites on Wagtail, the open-source CMS built for people who publish a lot and can’t wait on a developer to do it. Here’s what that looks like day to day.
Creative agency website design that doesn’t look like a template
If your site could belong to any studio, the thing that makes you different is invisible. Our creative agency website design starts with your work, your voice, and how you genuinely differ. You get a visual system that’s yours, with considered details that delight without getting in the way of the work.
Case studies that change shape from one piece of work to the next
No two pieces of work tell their story the same way. So instead of one fixed case study template, we build a library of blocks – showreels, galleries, before-and-after sliders, quotes, credits, and process shots – that your team arranges to fit each one. It’s Lego for your editors: the freedom to tell the story, without breaking the design.
Showreels and galleries that load fast on any screen
Heavy media is where most creative websites slow down. We size and compress images automatically, stream video properly, and load galleries as people scroll. Your work looks sharp on a phone with sketchy signal as well as on a studio monitor. Captions, alt text, and keyboard-friendly controls mean everyone can see it too.
A CMS editors can update in minutes (without breaking anything)
A lot of studios don’t have a dedicated web person, and the developer is always busy with client work. That’s how this year’s best work ends up missing from the site, and your pipeline never moves into paying clients. With Wagtail CMS, adding a case study, a news post, or a new team member takes minutes, not a ticket.
Live blogs for breaking news, festivals, and big moments
Every big news publisher covers breaking stories with a live blog, because readers want updates as they land, not a write-up a week later. Magazines and independent publishers can do the same for breaking news in their world, or for a festival, awards night, launch, or conference. We build live blogs into Wagtail so your team can post updates and vertical video from their phones, with a “live” marker at the top and a summary box of key updates. When the event ends, the live blog closes and stays on your site as a permanent record.
And when the event is the main story, we build the website around it. Yotta, run by DatacenterDynamics, is set to bring 12,000 people together in Las Vegas to tackle one of the biggest questions of the decade: how to power the growth of AI sustainably. We made and continue to scale the web platform that holds it all together – agenda, speakers, partners, expo – and keep it running when the whole industry tunes in.
AI SEO for creative agencies and studios
When a potential client asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews to recommend a studio, your website needs to be one they can read, trust, and quote. AI search builds on good SEO, so we start there: clear titles and descriptions, pages that link to each other, schema that tells AI tools who you are and what you’ve made, and FAQs that answer the questions your clients ask. Then we track how often AI tools mention and cite you, report it against your goals, and keep improving it month by month.
Archives that keep working for you
For magazines, publishers, and media, the back catalogue is the business. We structure years of features, issues, contributors, and topics so readers can browse and search them, and every article keeps bringing in readers long after it’s published.
Who we’re here for
If you make, commission, or publish creative work, the website has to keep up with it. We provide website design for creative businesses, agencies, and creative professionals in the UK, including:
VFX and post-production studios
that need showreels, before-and-after comparisons, and credits that play quickly and clearly on any screen – like our client Dupe, a B Corp VFX studio we partnered with to increase active web users by 59%.
Design, branding, and retail design consultancies
whose case studies change shape from one piece of work to the next – like our client Checkland Kindleysides.
Advertising and creative agencies
that need new work live while it’s still new. Our CMS workflows and website design for agencies means no waiting on a developer.
Magazines and independent publishers
with years of back issues, a team of contributors, and a publishing schedule to keep – plus live blogs for breaking news, the way the big publishers cover it.
Arts commissioners, museums, galleries, theatres, and cultural organisations
with work that doesn’t fit a standard template – like our art nonprofit client Artangel and independent charity Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
Media and events companies
running large conferences and expos, where the website has to handle agendas, speakers, sponsors, and thousands of visitors at once.
Music, film, and culture media
publishing reviews, interviews, and features – specialist music website design keeps embedded audio and video fast on any screen.
B Corps and mission-led creative businesses
that publish impact data and important research they want found, not buried in a PDF.
Creative websites in the wild
B Corp web design for Dupe: 59% more active users
Dupe, the first UK VFX studio to become a certified B Corp, had outgrown its Squarespace site. It needed a specialist website to show off video-rich work and publish impact data – carbon emissions, gender pay gap, overtime hours – in a way that worked on a phone.
We built the new site on Wagtail with custom templates for portfolios and data. Before-and-after views show exactly what Dupe’s VFX adds to each scene, and a Grafl.io integration lets editors build mobile-friendly charts straight into pages.
In the first year after launch, active users rose by 59%, new visitors by 57%, and average engagement time by 23%.
Artangel: 30 years of extraordinary art, accessible to all
Artangel has commissioned extraordinary art for more than 30 years, but its decade-old website buried most of it. Text overlapped images, navigation was unpredictable, and editors needed a 60-page manual to use the CMS.
Rather than a full rebuild, we gave the site a light-touch redesign and moved it to Wagtail. We migrated around 1,500 pages and 1,300 content modules, and built flexible blocks so editors can mix long-form features, sound, and moving images without a developer.
The site now meets WCAG AA, with more than 80 projects across 400 active pages and over 300 videos and audio clips that people can find.
We don’t launch your website and wish you luck
Our digital care is always there: covering hosting, security, and maintenance, and real people answering when you need something. As your work grows, the website grows with it, with improvements planned together rather than left to pile up.
Some website things creative businesses ask us
Plenty of agencies do. We’re a York-based specialist digital agency that has built for creative brands, studios, and arts organisations for almost 20 years – including Dupe, Checkland Kindleysides, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and Artangel. Our clients love how easy it is to manage content, with a flexible CMS and super-clean frontend that allows editors to build pages without losing the brand’s identity. We don’t just disappear after a build – 92% of our clients have stayed with us over the last five years because we stick around and share the load.
The best creative agency websites put your most valuable work first and make it easy to find. Case studies explain the brief and the result, not just the pictures. They load fast on a phone, remain true to your brand identity, offer one clear way to get in touch, and let your team update them the day the work goes live.
The best CMS for design lets designers set the rules and editors work freely inside them. We use Wagtail: its flexible content blocks let your team build varied pages without breaking the design, and it’s open source, so there’s a great community constantly building value. Wagtail is the CMS behind Google’s blog, Tate, London Museum, and Mozilla’s Firefox.com. We didn’t build those sites (you can see the ones we’ve made here), but it means your website runs on the same CMS that Google’s publishing team and some of the world’s best-known galleries chose.
Yes. Museum website design, gallery website design, and theatre website design all share the same challenge: showing work that doesn’t fit a template to every audience, alongside events, archives, and fundraising – often on a nonprofit budget. We’ve built for creative partners like Artangel and heritage organisations like Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
If they want to achieve growth goals, yes. Most creative and brand agencies have the strategy, design, and content skills in-house, but not the technical SEO, schema, and AI visibility tracking that generative engine optimisation (GEO) needs. Nor the time outside of client work! That’s the gap we fill: the optimisation work in the middle – titles, descriptions, internal links, structured data – done every month and reported against your goals. We can do it for your own website, and we’re happy to talk about working alongside you on your clients’ websites too.
Not if the migration is done properly. We map every old URL to its new home, carry links across, and check rankings before and after launch, so the authority your site has built comes with it.
With a conversation about your work, your clients, and what the site needs to do. From there, our process runs through discovery, design, build, testing, and launch, with digital care afterwards if you want it.
