Web design in Ely

What Ely's economy looks like

Ely is small for a city. It holds that status because of its cathedral, the seat of a diocese, and in 1974 city status was confirmed by royal charter. The cathedral and the streets around it draw visitors all year. Oliver Cromwell lived in Ely from 1636 to 1646, and his house near the cathedral has been open as an attraction and the tourist information centre since 1990.

Away from the historic centre the economy looks quite different. The land around the city is some of the most intensively farmed in England, because the drained Fens are used mainly for agriculture. Growers, packers, machinery dealers, agronomists and haulage firms all operate within a short drive of Ely, and many of them sell to other businesses rather than to the public.

Then there is Lancaster Way Business Park on the edge of the city, about 175 acres of offices, warehouses, laboratories and manufacturing units. Part of the estate became an Enterprise Zone in April 2016. Firms there range from distributors and engineering companies to science-led businesses that chose Ely for space and cost while staying within reach of Cambridge.

A rail hub with a short hop to Cambridge

Ely station is a junction, with lines to Cambridge and London, Norwich, Ipswich, King's Lynn, Peterborough and beyond. Plenty of people live in Ely and work in Cambridge, and the reverse is true too. For a business, that means your customers and your staff may be found well beyond East Cambridgeshire, and your website has to make sense to people who do not know the area.

How Ely customers search

Search behaviour in Ely splits roughly three ways, and it is worth knowing which group you serve before you design anything.

The mistake we see most often is a business that serves the third group building a website for the first. A packaging supplier on Lancaster Way does not need cathedral photography on its homepage. It needs product ranges, lead times and a quote form.

Websites for Ely's visitor businesses

Cafés, guesthouses, gift shops and boat operators in Ely compete with each other and with Cambridge for a visitor's day. Most visitors plan on their phones, often the same morning. A few things make a measurable difference to whether they choose you:

• Opening hours that are correct on the website and on Google, including bank holidays and cathedral event days.
• A clear map or directions from the station and the main car parks.
• Menus or price lists as real text, not photographed PDFs.
• Direct booking where you can, so you are not paying a commission on every guest.
• Pages that answer the questions visitors ask by email, such as dogs, accessibility and parking.

Agri-food and rural businesses

Farming and food businesses around Ely increasingly need a website for reasons other than direct sales: recruiting seasonal and permanent staff, reassuring supermarket and trade buyers, explaining sustainability practices, or supporting grant and planning applications. These sites need to be plain, accurate and easy to keep current, with real photographs of the land, crops and people.

Business park firms

For companies on Lancaster Way and the other estates around the city, the website is usually a sales tool for buyers who never visit Ely. That calls for well-structured service or product pages, case studies written in honest qualitative terms, and enough technical detail for a specialist buyer to shortlist you. Science and engineering firms based here often recruit from Cambridge, so a careers section that explains the commute by rail is worth having.

How we work with Ely businesses

Ely is a short train ride from Cambridge, so meeting in person for a discovery workshop is easy. The rest of a project usually runs over video calls and shared documents. We plan the site around the customers you actually have in and around Ely, set up local search properly and train whoever will update it.

Working with us from Ely

Most of our work with businesses outside the city runs over video calls and email, with meetings in person when they are useful. Your website is planned around your customers in Ely and the surrounding area, not around a template used for every town.