Area

Web design in Heslington and York Science Park

Heslington, on the south-east side of the city, is home to the University of York and to York Science Park, which the university owns. The park's main site sits beside the campus and houses technology and science companies working in fields from software development to medical technology. It also runs the Catalyst building on Campus East, aimed at early-stage digital, IT and media businesses, and the Guildhall in the city centre. Companies on the park can work with university departments such as Computer Science, Electronics, Biology and Mathematics.

A few miles north-east of the city, York Biotech Campus at Sand Hutton adds an 80-acre site focused on agri-food and life sciences, with Fera Science as its anchor tenant. Between them, these sites give York a research economy far larger than its size would suggest.

Who reads a research company's website

Science and technology firms have more varied audiences than most businesses, and each reads the site differently:

Investors check whether the problem, the market and the team are credible, and whether the site is maintained.
Candidates, often from the university itself, want to know what the science is, who they would work with and whether the company is stable.
Research partners look for methods, data, publications and a named contact.
Commercial customers want to know what they can buy, how long it takes and how samples or data are handled.
Funders and public bodies check that you can communicate clearly, and often expect accessible websites.

A good site serves all of them without diluting the science or burying the plain-English explanation.

Structure that works for spin-outs

We usually build research company sites in layers. The homepage opens with a single sentence a non-specialist can follow, then gives the problem, two or three facts you can publicly stand behind and clear routes into the rest of the site. Below that sit:

Technology or platform pages, written for scientists from adjacent fields, with diagrams.
Services or applications, for commercial buyers.
Publications, posters, datasets and patents, easy for the team to add to.
Team and advisory pages, written or approved by each person.
Careers, with real descriptions of roles and how the company works.
Contact routes split by purpose: commercial, partnerships, press, jobs.

Our guide to building a website for a science park spin-out goes into each of these.

Practical considerations

University relationships. Spin-outs often have rules on how they describe their link with the university and whether they can use its name or marks. We build those checks into the content plan.

Accessibility. Many partners are public bodies and universities with accessibility duties, and tenders increasingly ask about it. We build to WCAG 2.2 AA as standard and can provide an accessibility audit for existing sites.

Lean technology. A research company's site rarely needs a heavy content management system. A fast static site is cheap to run, very secure and easy to update for news and publications.

Getting found. People looking for a capability search for it by its technical name. Pages that name and explain each capability clearly will be found by the right people.

Agri-food and biotech at Sand Hutton

Companies at the biotech campus often sell to farmers, growers and food manufacturers as well as to scientists and funders. That calls for practical, plainly written pages about benefits on the farm or in the factory, backed by research pages for those who want detail. Real photographs from trials and sites carry far more weight than generic laboratory imagery.

Common mistakes we see

The most common is a homepage written for a grant panel, dense with terminology and hard for an investor or candidate to follow. Another is a news page last updated when the company was founded, which suggests the business has stalled even when it has not. A third is a single contact address for everything, so partnership enquiries sit in the same inbox as job applications and sales calls.

What we usually recommend

Write the one-sentence description first, then plan pages around each audience.
Choose a light, fast build that the team can update without help.
Build accessibility in from the start.
Plan for growth: careers and publications sections that scale.

Relevant services: branding and copywriting for positioning and plain-English copy, and WordPress and custom development for the build.