Web design in Philadelphia

The size of the market

Pennsylvania has roughly 1.1 million small businesses, and 200,625 of them fall in the one-to-19 employee band (SBA Office of Advocacy, 2024). New Jersey, for comparison, has 979,085 small businesses with 171,968 in that same band. Philadelphia is the largest single concentration in the Commonwealth.

The one-to-19 band is the relevant number for us. That is the corner restaurant with eight staff, the roofing outfit with two crews, the salon with four chairs, the dental practice with a hygienist and a front desk. Below that band sit the sole traders, and above it companies large enough to have someone in-house who deals with the website. The middle is who we build for.

Corridors, not a single downtown

Philadelphia trade does not happen in one place. It happens along neighbourhood commercial corridors — East Passyunk, Frankford Avenue in Fishtown, Girard Avenue, Baltimore Avenue in West Philadelphia, Germantown Avenue up in Chestnut Hill, and a dozen more. Each corridor has its own catchment, its own price expectations and its own regulars.

That has a practical consequence for a website. A corridor business is usually competing for the person already within a mile of it, and for the person deciding whether to make the trip. So the site has to answer the trip question early: where exactly you are, what the parking or transit situation is, what your hours actually are today, and what makes the journey worth it. A restaurant page that opens with a full-width photograph and no address is failing at the only job it has.

Menus should be readable text on a page, not a PDF. If you are a BYOB, say so at the top — it is the first thing people want to know and it is worth money to you.

Rowhome trades

Philadelphia's housing stock is old, dense and attached, and that produces a set of trades you do not see in the same concentration anywhere else in our patch: pointing and masonry, stucco and coating, flat and rubber roofs, party-wall work, basement waterproofing, rewiring houses that still have knob-and-tube, and drain work in cast-iron stacks that are a century old.

If that is your trade, the website should be specific about it. "Roofing" is a weak page. "Flat roof replacement and coating on Philadelphia rowhomes" is a page that a homeowner with a leak recognises as their exact problem. Rowhome work also brings questions a suburban contractor never gets asked — access, shared walls, neighbours, permits, and whether you have dealt with a landlord and a tenant at the same time. Answering those on the page saves you the first ten minutes of every phone call.

Most of these trades do fine on the $500 one-page site: what you do, where you do it, licence and insurance details, photographs of finished work, and a phone number that dials when tapped. If you run three genuinely distinct services, the $900 five-page build gives each one its own page.

An honest word about the competition

We looked at the live search results before writing this. Philadelphia web design is held by established local agencies with real reputations and real portfolios. That is not the situation in, say, Toms River, where the results are unusually thin and a Facebook page ranks on the first page. Philadelphia is a proper market with proper competitors in it.

So we will be straight about where we stand. We are not the best-known name in Philadelphia web design and we are not going to outrank the firms that have been there twenty years. What we offer instead is a published price you can read without booking a discovery call, a written scope that says line by line what is in the build and what is not, delivery in about two weeks, and no monthly retainer at the end of it.

The 2025 Clutch survey is useful here. It found that 17% of small businesses still have no website, and that among those, 34% say it is "not relevant to my industry" while only 16% cite cost. In practice, when we talk to Philadelphia trades who have held off, cost is usually the unspoken half of it — specifically, the fear of an open-ended bill and a monthly charge that never stops. Publishing three fixed numbers is the most direct answer we can give to that.

What working across the river looks like

Seaside Park to Philadelphia is a long enough run that we are not going to be dropping in. Almost everything happens by phone, email and video, and it works perfectly well: we agree the structure in writing before we design anything, you review the site on your own phone, and we take two rounds of revisions.

If your project genuinely needs someone in the room every week, hire a Philadelphia agency. That is a fair reason to spend more, and we would rather you did that than end up unhappy with us.

Terms, plainly

$500 for a one-page site. $900 for a five-page build. $1,800 for an online store. One payment, no retainer. About two weeks from the day we have your words and photographs.

The domain is registered in your name and stays yours. You get the hosting login, the files and the analytics. Hosting and the domain are billed at cost — a .com is roughly $15 to $25 a year, and small static hosting runs between nothing and about $5 a month. We do not mark either of them up, and we do not hold anything hostage if you leave.