About
Who you'll be dealing with
A small studio in Basildon that builds websites for small businesses across Essex and east London. No account managers, no sales team, no call centre. The person who designs your site is the person who builds it and answers your emails.
See what we'd make for your business
Free. No payment details. You'll have a reply within one working day.
Why this exists
There are two ways to get a website in this country, and neither of them suits a plumber.
You can pay a builder a fiver a month, spend three weekends fighting it, and end up with something that looks like everyone else's. Or you can go to an agency, wait three months, sit through a workshop about your brand values and pay three grand.
Nothing existed in the middle: a proper custom site, designed around what a business actually sells, at a price a sole trader can pay without thinking about it too hard. That gap is the whole business, and the work is what it looks like filled.
Modern tools made that gap fillable. The work that used to need a team of five and three months now needs one designer and a week. We passed the saving on instead of keeping it, because a full order book at £499 beats an empty one at £2,000.
Where the name comes from
Optio is Latin for choice. It was also a rank in the Roman army: the officer's deputy, the one who actually got things done while everyone else made speeches.
Both halves seemed about right for a business built on giving small firms an option they didn't have, and then getting on with it.
How we work
Five rules. They're on the website because they're easier to keep when they're in public.
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01
You see it before you pay
Every job starts with a real design of your homepage, free, before any money or commitment. If it isn't right, that's where it ends and it's cost you nothing but an afternoon. How that works, step by step.
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02
Every price is on the page
£375, £499, £799, £13 a year for a domain, £15 a month after the first year. No "prices on application", no quote that depends on how wealthy you look. Every price, in full.
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03
Nothing is held hostage
Your domain is registered in your name, not ours. Your site is yours. Ask us to hand it all over and we'll do it free, the same week, without asking why. The domain terms say so in writing.
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04
Fast because the waste is gone, not the care
Seven days is possible because there's no agency machinery: no onboarding, no status meetings, no account manager relaying messages. The design thinking takes as long as it takes.
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05
Only what we can finish properly
We take on what we can complete in seven days each, alongside doing every one of them properly. When we're full, we'll tell you the next date rather than take your money and make you wait.
Rule one is the easy one to test.
Get my free designFree. No payment details. You'll have a reply within one working day.
What we won't do
A shorter list than the things we will, and more useful to you.
- Sell you an online shop you don't need. If you take three orders a month, a phone number does the job better and costs nothing to run.
- Sell you SEO as a monthly mystery. The search work is built into the site and explained. There's no £300-a-month retainer with a report nobody reads.
- Put a chatbot on your site. Your customers want your phone number, not a robot asking how it can help today.
- Take on more work than we can finish in seven days. Even when it's tempting, and it will be.
- Tie you into anything. No minimum term on custom sites, no exit fee, no clause about who owns what.
Where we work
Based in Basildon. In person anywhere in Essex or east London, and by email anywhere at all.
Who we build for
Most of the work is for plumbers, electricians, salons, cafés, personal trainers and mobile therapists. If your trade isn't on that list it changes nothing, because the answers are different for every business anyway.
If something goes wrong
Every studio's About page says what happens when things go well. Here's the other half.
Your site goes down
We're told before you are, because uptime monitoring runs on every site we host. Static sites on Cloudflare almost never go down, and when something does break it's usually a domain renewal rather than the site itself.
You hate a change we made
Every version is backed up daily, so putting it back is a five-minute job and there's no charge for it. Say so and it's done the same working day.
You want to leave
We hand over the site files and transfer the domain into your own account, free, the same week. No exit fee, no retention call, no "let me check with my manager".
A payment fails
Your site stays up. You get two emails before anything happens, and a card that expired is a conversation rather than a switch being flipped.
We get something wrong
We fix it and we don't bill for the fixing. If a mistake costs you something real, tell us and we'll sort it out properly rather than quote the terms at you.
We're full
You get told the next available date rather than a slower build. The limit exists for a reason, and stretching it would break the seven days for everyone already booked.
The short version
- You see the design before you pay a penny. Don't like it, walk away.
- The site and the domain are in your name, transferred free whenever you ask.
- Emails get answered within one working day, by a person.
Free. No payment details. You'll have a reply within one working day.
Being new, honestly
Consult Optio is new. Four sites are already live and named on the work page, but four is not a wall of five-star reviews, and we're not going to invent the rest.
What there is instead is the free design. You see real work, made for your business, before you decide anything. That's a better test than any testimonial, and it's the reason to be the one who goes first.
Reviews will appear on this site as clients leave them. Real ones, with names and towns, and nothing else.
Get hold of us
- Emailhello@consultoptio.co.uk
- Phone07487 808953
- WhereBasildon, Essex
- HoursMonday to Friday, 9am to 6pm. Saturday mornings by arrangement.
- RepliesWithin one working day, by a person
See what we'd make for your business
Four quick questions is all it takes to start. The design lands within 48 hours.
Free. No payment details. You'll have a reply within one working day.