Quick one. We’ve just launched a small side project: webdesignreviews.co.uk — a directory of UK web designers ranked by their Google reviews.
The idea was simple. We split the UK into counties (plus Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland), then pulled the top 30 web designers in each region using Google’s APIs. Every listing is ranked by a Bayesian-smoothed Google review score — so a tiny studio with five perfect reviews can’t leapfrog an agency with 200 — and we refresh the data monthly. No paid placement, ever.
It’s part showcase, part experiment. We wanted to see how far we could push a real-world directory built on top of the Google Places / Maps APIs — pagination quirks, rate limits, deduplication, fuzzy geographic boundaries, the lot. Turns out: pretty far.
Some numbers as it stands today:
- 1,523 UK web designers indexed
- 51 regions covered (every English county plus all three nations)
- ~60,708 Google reviews analysed
- 30 ranked agencies per county (most are fully populated)
And yes, we listed dotwall too — currently sitting at #1 in Leicestershire with 126 five-star reviews. Felt rude not to.
If you run a UK web design business with five-plus genuine Google reviews, you can submit your business and it’ll be considered for the next refresh. It’s free. We just wanted to build something useful for people genuinely trying to find a good web designer without wading through Yell.com or the SEO-spam side of Google.
Have a poke around: webdesignreviews.co.uk. There’s a daily “county spotlight” that surfaces a different region’s top three each morning, a live UK top 10, and a map of every listed agency.
Built — like dotwall.co.uk itself — in Astro, with the Google Places API doing the heavy lifting in the background. Fast, no plugins, no faff. Exactly the way we like it.
Want a website that’s just as snappy? Get in touch or grab a free homepage mock-up — delivered in 12 hours.