Fakenham is the largest town in the North Norfolk district and the commercial hub for a wide rural catchment, from the Wensum valley across to the coast road. It is a working town rather than a holiday one: a Thursday market held under a charter granted in 1250, an agricultural trade that still shapes the local economy, Kinnerton Confectionery employing several hundred people on the edge of town, and the only National Hunt racecourse in Norfolk.
A printing town, which we take as a compliment
Printing was Fakenham's main industry through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the town has printing blocks set into the surface of the Market Place and a press on its town sign to prove it. Typesetting work still goes on here. It is a small thing, but it is the reason this page was an easy one to write: the studio's founder started out doing newspaper pasteup, and the distance between laying out a page with a scalpel and laying one out in a browser is shorter than people assume. Towns with that history tend to have a good instinct for whether something has been properly set.
The honest bit about the distance
Fakenham is roughly fifty minutes from our studio in Smallburgh, which makes it the furthest of the Norfolk towns we cover, and we would rather say so than pretend the map is flattering. In practice it changes very little, because we work remotely as standard and always have. What it does change is the number of site visits: usually one at the start and one at handover, rather than dropping in whenever it suits. If having a studio you can walk to matters more to you than anything else, there are good people closer, and we will happily say so.
What Fakenham briefs usually need
Much the same shape as the rest of north Norfolk. A site that loads quickly on a rural connection, ranks for the searches your customers actually type, and tells somebody in one screen whether you can help them. Businesses here serve a catchment rather than a street, which usually means the site needs to be clear about the area covered as well as the address. Modern tools, sensibly used, and nothing you will need us to operate on your behalf.
If you are in Fakenham or the villages around it, get in touch and we will give you a straight answer about what your site needs, including if the answer is not much.
