For the business owner who is brilliant at the work, has a million ideas and a website that embarrasses them: what a Somerset studio built on referrals actually does about it.
The photography business had a website that looked, on the surface, perfectly decent. Then Charlotte England looked behind it. “Bloody hell,” she says. “The thing was being held together by 42 plugins. FORTY-TWO!” The layout was confusing, the customer journey went everywhere at once, and there were so many calls to action that visitors, as she puts it, “probably didn’t know whether they were coming or going.”
She sees the same thing constantly. “Business owners think that adding more buttons, more information and more features will make their website better,” she says. “Usually, it just makes everything more complicated.” Her approach was to strip the site back and ask what it was actually supposed to achieve: who was visiting, what did they need to know, and what did we want them to do next. “Because a website shouldn’t make people work hard to figure out how to become your customer. Sometimes the cleverest thing you can do with a website is make it simpler.”
Charlotte is the director of The Web Barn, a WordPress studio in the Somerset countryside that turns ten this month. She builds websites for coaches, consultants and personal brand businesses, hosts and maintains them so the owners don’t have to think about them, and fixes the ones other people built badly. Over ten years she has built and worked on more than 300 websites, and The Web Barn currently hosts and maintains over 100 of them. By her account the studio has never relied on advertising. “I’ve built it largely through relationships, networking, recommendations and referrals,” she says.
She is also particular about who she builds for: founders with ADHD running B2B businesses. “I absolutely love working with business owners who think differently, particularly those with ADHD, because I understand how their brains work,” she says. “I’m one of them!” These are people with a million brilliant ideas who struggle to translate everything going on in their heads into a website that clearly communicates what they do. She understands the feeling, she says, because she has been there herself.
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What You Are Actually Buying
Her profile asks a question of anyone about to spend thousands on a new website: what are you actually buying? Her answer is not a set of pages.
“You’re not buying a collection of pages on the internet. You’re buying credibility, confidence and a salesperson who doesn’t need paying a salary, take holidays or call in sick.”
Charlotte England, Director, The Web Barn
A good website, she says, should be doing some of the heavy lifting in the business rather than sitting there looking pretty. It should explain what you do, who you help and why someone should choose you, answer questions before people think to ask them, and make it ridiculously easy for the right people to get in touch.
What frustrates her is what happens afterwards. “I always think it’s a bit bonkers when someone spends thousands on a website and then does absolutely nothing with it,” she says. “Your business changes. Your services evolve. Your customers change. Why on earth would your website stay exactly the same?” She wants owners to stop treating a website as a one-off expense and start seeing it as a working part of the business. She learned the trade a long time before she had a business of her own to apply it to.
A Laptop and a Converted Barn
Charlotte’s first job in marketing was a summer job at Sinclaire Knight Marketing in 2011. The firm kept her on part time through her A-levels, then full time from 2012, and she grew from Google examinations into an online marketing consultant who also kept the books. In 2014 she moved to Teapot Creative, where she created her own role as studio manager.
Then came the first of what she calls the turns that mattered. “The first big turning point was being made redundant,” she says. “At the time, I was raising two children on my own, and I wanted to be a more present mum. I didn’t want to spend my life trying to fit my children around somebody else’s working hours. So I decided to build something of my own.”
The Web Barn started in October 2016, working from a converted barn on a farm in Somerset. “I certainly didn’t have some grand business plan mapped out,” she says. “I knew marketing, I knew websites, and I knew I wanted to create a better life for my family. So I got on with it.” On her profile she describes how general marketing work narrowed into the thing it is now: she kept being asked to sort websites, then to build them, then to maintain them, then to fix the ones other people had built badly and left clients too scared to touch. “Turns out that’s my thing.” Having her own business did not, it turned out, mean running it her own way.
Trying to Look Like a Proper Business Owner
“The second turning point was realising that running your own business doesn’t automatically mean you’re doing things your own way,” Charlotte says. “I spent years reading business books, listening to experts and looking at what other successful business owners were doing. And then I’d try to make my business look like theirs.”
She thought she needed to follow certain processes, work certain hours and generally behave like a “proper” business owner. “The problem was, half of it didn’t suit me,” she says.
She counts it among the hardest parts of the ten years. “One of the hardest things has been realising how much time I’ve wasted trying to make my business fit somebody else’s idea of success,” she says. “I’d read something about how you should run a business, convince myself I was doing it all wrong, and then try to change everything. It’s exhausting!” Looking back, she wishes she had had the confidence to trust herself sooner. The third turn gave her a way to.
The Diagnosis, and the Coaching After It
“The third turning point was my ADHD diagnosis and the coaching I had afterwards,” Charlotte says. “That changed so much about how I understood myself. I started recognising why certain things had always felt harder than they should, but also why other things came so naturally.”
She is clear about which is which. “I’m brilliant at seeing the bigger picture, connecting ideas, solving problems and building relationships. I’m not always brilliant at doing things the way someone else thinks they should be done. And that’s absolutely fine.”
The person she credits most is Jeremy Jacobs, who she worked with during her ADHD coaching. “He encouraged me to stop trying to squeeze myself into systems and ways of working that weren’t right for me, and instead build something around how my brain actually works,” she says.
“For years, I thought I needed to change how I worked to fit what a successful business owner was supposed to look like. Now I realise I needed to build a business that worked for me.”
Charlotte, Director, The Web Barn
Those are the business owners she now builds for, and she describes them from the inside.
Who She Works With, and How
“These are often incredibly talented, creative and ambitious people who are brilliant at what they do, but their websites don’t always reflect that,” she says. “They’ve got a million ideas, they know their stuff, but communicating it all in a way that makes sense to potential clients can be a nightmare. That’s where I come in.” On her profile she goes further: when a client tells her the tech feels overwhelming, that they have 47 tabs open and the website is the one thing they keep moving to next week’s list, she is not judging. “I’ve been there. I just also know how to fix it.”
The process, as she describes it in a post, is “very unscary.” A discovery call, a proposal, then working through what pages are actually needed, what goes where, the customer journey and “what’s important and what’s just fluff,” with dates set for each stage up to going live. “We work through the site in chunks so it never feels massively overwhelming or chaotic,” she wrote.
What she is not interested in is volume. “I’m not particularly interested in churning out websites for the sake of it,” she says. “I want to work with business owners who are passionate about what they do and need someone who can take all those brilliant ideas and turn them into a website that actually works for their business.”
Her LinkedIn reads the way she talks, swearing included, and she has had the conversation about whether that is professional. In a post last month listing things she has been told and decided are nonsense, she wrote: “‘Don’t swear, it’s unprofessional.’ Fuck off. The right clients really don’t care.” The right clients, in her experience, tend to arrive through people she already knows.
Built on Relationships
The line Charlotte says she lives by is an old one: “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” She means it. “Obviously, knowing your stuff matters,” she says. “But the relationships you build, the people you surround yourself with and the connections you make can completely change the direction of your life.”
“The Web Barn has been built on relationships. Not clever advertising campaigns or complicated sales funnels. Just getting to know people, helping where I can, being myself and trusting that good relationships lead to good things.”
Charlotte, Director, The Web Barn
Much of that happens at Circle Networks, where she hosts a Friday morning meeting. “I don’t want to spend 90 minutes listening to everyone pitch their business at me, and I don’t want to do that to them either,” she wrote after one of them. “I want to know the person behind the business, have a laugh, remember what we’ve talked about and actually build a relationship.” Those people, she wrote, become business contacts, referral partners, clients and, quite often, actual friends.
Where Charlotte Is Now
The Web Barn turns ten this month, and the anniversary arrived with news. The studio is a finalist in the Technology & Innovation category at the Sedgemoor Chamber of Commerce Business Excellence Awards 2026, with the winner announced on 20 November. “From starting a business at 22, with absolutely no idea where it would take me, to now being shortlisted for an award like this feels a bit fucking mad when I actually stop and think about it,” she wrote.
The people she wants to hear from next are founders with ADHD running B2B businesses. “I want someone to read this and think, ‘Oh my God, she gets it. She’s exactly who I need to sort my website out,’” she says. Ten years in, what she is proudest of is what the business has allowed: “I’ve raised two children on my own, paid the bills, kept a roof over our heads and built something that’s mine.” And the moments that confirm it: “When someone tells me I’ve made their life easier, that they finally understand their website, or that I’ve helped them feel more confident about their business. That’s when I think, ‘Yep. This is why I do it.’”
Outside the studio, her family owns a campsite and fishing lake, which she helps run, and which brings events including Nudefest and a hot air balloon festival. “It’s a completely different world from websites and marketing, and I get to meet all sorts of interesting people,” she says. “You never know who you’re going to meet or where a conversation might lead.”
“It’s taken me ten years to get here,” she says, “but I’m finally giving myself permission to do things my way.”
Five Lines from Charlotte’s Diary
“Sometimes the cleverest thing you can do with a website is make it simpler.”
“A website shouldn’t make people work hard to figure out how to become your customer.”
“Just because something works for someone else doesn’t mean it’s right for me.”
“I knew marketing, I knew websites, and I knew I wanted to create a better life for my family.”
“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”
From the Diary of Charlotte England
Charlotte England is a Langport, Somerset-based WordPress designer and the Director of The Web Barn.
| Role | Director, The Web Barn |
| Based in | Langport, Somerset, England |
| Previously with | Teapot Creative (2014 to 2015), Sinclaire Knight Marketing (2011 to 2014) |
| Also with | Circle Networks, host of the Friday networking meeting |
“Sometimes the cleverest thing you can do with a website is make it simpler.”
Editor’s Note
The editors chose Charlotte England because she names her reader before she names her service. Her answers describe a specific kind of business owner, the one with the ideas and the overwhelming tech, and she describes them from the inside rather than from a brief. The 42-plugin website gave the piece a concrete problem and her own line gave it the answer. A ten-year studio run without advertising is a record the reader can check. The piece keeps her words, including the ones she has been told not to use.
Executives Diary, Editorial
