A small UK studio, quietly getting on with the work.

We build bespoke websites (designed from scratch, not adapted from templates) for businesses that want a site to do real work. We host and look after them once they're live. And we use modern tools, including AI, where they earn their keep.

We work on two stacks. WordPress with Divi suits clients who want a familiar platform, easy to extend with plugins, well-matched to people with a little technical know-how who like adding their own content and functionality. Modern JS frameworks like Astro and Next.js, paired with Payload CMS, suit clients who want a fast, secure site with a clean, focused editing experience. We listen first, then recommend the right fit for the project.

That's the headline. The rest of this page is about the studio behind it, and the person who runs it.

The studio is run by Ric, a Norfolk native who's been building things with code, design, and computers since the 1980s.

I grew up in Norfolk and have spent most of my life living here. I started writing code as a child in the 1980s, mostly out of curiosity. Coding wasn't really the goal, it was the means to build the things I was curious about. That instinct has stayed the same ever since. Code, design, and technology are tools to make things work properly, not ends in themselves.

In the early 1990s I worked as a pasteup artist for a large newspaper company with multiple publications, laying out pages by hand using the old hot-wax method. After that I went back to studying. A BSc in Psychology and Cognitive Science, then a PhD in Computational Neuroscience, then a post-doctoral position. The post-doc work was based around computational modelling of the basal ganglia and the striatum (specific brain regions involved in decision-making and selecting actions), building biologically realistic models at different levels of detail, from individual neurons through to networks and systems-level circuits. The research group’s central interest was action selection, but the wider work covered a lot of related ground. Building models of brains doing intelligent things turns out to be much the same problem as building machines to do intelligent things, and uses the same mathematical tools, so by the time AI became mainstream, the underlying methods were already familiar.

After research I moved into business. A boat hire company on the Norfolk Broads led to an online chandlery (my first proper e-commerce build, in 2010), which led to other websites for other businesses, which eventually led to BrainWeb being incorporated in 2016. Along the way I also designed and built a commercial aquaponics system as part of a separate venture with my wife, a project we'd already committed to before COVID hit, and then had to try to launch a new business through the middle of a pandemic. It worked technically; the timing was less kind.

Curiosity has been the through-line. The work history looks scattered on paper (newspaper, academia, boats, ecommerce, agriculture, web), but the pattern underneath is consistent: each was something I wanted to understand or build, and once it was up and running I tended to look for the next interesting problem. (The diagnoses of ADHD and dyslexia, which came later in life, both go some way to explaining the appetite for variety.) For BrainWeb’s clients, this shows up as genuine interest in your business and the problem you’re trying to solve.

These days the day-to-day coding is mostly JavaScript, TypeScript, and Python, with regular use of Next.js, Astro, Tailwind, and Payload CMS alongside the WordPress, Divi, and PHP work that forms the backbone of many client builds.

We're based in Smallburgh, a small village in north Norfolk roughly ten minutes from North Walsham, Stalham, or Wroxham. Most of our clients are within an hour or two of us (Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, and out across East Anglia), but we work with businesses right across the UK, and occasionally further afield. The work happens largely remotely; site visits and in-person meetings happen when they help.

For local clients, we'll often come to you so we can see your business properly (a workshop, a shop floor, a restaurant kitchen), which usually tells us more in twenty minutes than an hour of slide decks. When that's not practical, a local café works well. Distant clients get a video call that runs to time. All three approaches have produced excellent projects.