“They were able to help with strategy and thinking out a bit further than what we were going to do in the next 3 months. They’ve been able to solve lots of challenges that we’ve had and it’s always led to opportunity.”
Be the answer.
Strategy, Brand & Web
The internet used to serve people ten blue links. Now it gives them an answer. At Whitelaw Mitchell we build brands and digital platforms designed to become the recommendation, not just another name on the list.
You found us
We’ve been expecting you.
Someone, or something, you trust sent you our way. So here you are: already informed, mildly intrigued and one good reason away from yes.
We build brands and websites for this exact moment. The proof after the recommendation. The click before the call. The small but important shift from “maybe” to “these are my people”.
Proof beats promises
case study
Ben Hudson Architects
strategy • brand • web
49.6% increase in organic search traffic. Getting found was the hard part. The architecture has never needed help closing.
case study
Arrowtown
strategy • web
1,500% more traffic to Arrowtown’s member business listings. A destination website should move people through the town, not just show them pretty pictures of it.
case study
Black
strategy • web
23% increase in user engagement. People linger first, and the lingering is where the decision actually happens.
Turns out good taste can be measured.
About us
Direct access to the creative brains you hired.
Meet Kim & Maranda.
One obsesses over ideas, stories and the words that make a brand mean something. The other obsesses over systems, technology and making sure the beautiful thing actually performs.
No junior handoffs. No rotating account managers. No elaborate game of agency telephone tag.
The people asking the deeper questions are the people doing the work. As it should be.
what we do
Strategy. Brand. Web.
Working together.
01
Strategy
Before we build the brand, we build the thinking. We need to know what the business is becoming and who needs to care. You leave with a clearer business. Not just a longer document.
02
Brand
Good design gets noticed. A distinctive brand gets remembered. We create names, identities, messaging and brand systems that turn good ideas into brands people can recognise, trust and choose.
03
Intelligent Websites
Your website could be doing a hell of a lot more.
We’ve developed proprietary AI intelligence that watches, learns and spots opportunities while your competitors are still staring at dashboards.
See what you’re missing.
The new reality
(for anyone still calling AI a trend)
54% of consumers now use AI to compare products and services.
Halfway already. And climbing every day.
ClaudeBot crawled 38,065 pages for every referral visit it sent back.
AI may be reading your site long before a customer visits it.
Traffic from AI search has increased 527% year on year.
AI is becoming a much bigger part of how people search.
It’s here now.
AI is moving quickly. Our Creative Insider newsletter helps you keep up without drowning in it. We’ll email you the shifts worth knowing about and what they mean for your brand, website and business.
About you
Ambitious, decisive, and definitely not ordinary.
You’re here because there’s an idea worth getting right. Maybe it’s brand new. Maybe the business has grown faster than the brand around it. Either way, you want honest thinking, strong opinions and something people can recognise before the logo even shows up.
Bring the ambition. We’ll take it from there.
If you want quick, cheap and comfortably familiar, we’ll save you the meeting. If you want sharper thinking and something harder to ignore, now we’re talking.
the internet has changed.
Naturally, you have questions.
There’s no useful one-size-fits-all number because a brand, a five-page website and a full business transformation are not the same purchase wearing different price tags. As a guide, smaller engagements start from $10K+ with full transformations ranging $20K–$50K. Strategy is always included, because without it, design and web work don’t perform. We fix-price projects upfront, based on what the business actually needs. No hourly meter secretly ticking in the corner.
Kim and Maranda. The same two people you meet at the beginning. Maranda leads brand, strategy and creative direction. Kim leads development, technology and the systems underneath it. There are no junior handoffs, rotating account managers or mysterious production team appearing once the contract is signed. We stay close to the work and the business because that’s where the good stuff tends to happen.
If you want a clearer picture of how we actually work, we unpack it in Demystifying Design Agencies
If you’re investing properly, a new build will usually create far more value than trying to stretch an old platform into a job it was never designed to do. Our websites are built on a modern proprietary tech stack designed for speed, flexibility, AI visibility and long-term growth, so the foundations are doing as much work as the design.
A refresh changes what people see. A rebuild changes what the website can actually do.
By doing more than looking expensive. A strong brand makes the business easier to recognise, trust and choose. A strong website turns that into action by improving discovery, engagement and the path to enquiry or purchase. Then we measure what happens next. Our client work has produced incredible results including 49.6% more organic search traffic for Ben Hudson Architects, 23% higher engagement for Black, and a 20x increase in average engagement time for Coterra. Good design gets attention. Good strategy gives that attention somewhere useful to go.
Quite a lot in today’s climate. Not the fundamentals, but where the decision starts. People can now ask AI to research, compare and recommend businesses without working their way through a page of search results. That means your website needs to be technically accessible and clear about who you are, what you do and why you’re credible. OpenAI confirms public websites can appear in ChatGPT search, while Google says the same strong SEO foundations still matter in its AI experiences: crawlability, useful content, visible information and accurate structure.
Nice things clients say.
Hear from Nigel, Founder and Director of Black, and Sam from Lucyking, about what it’s like to work with us.
“They’re truly invested in what it is that you’re trying to achieve and to see if what they’ve done has actually generated the results they wanted as well, which in our case, it absolutely has.”
A little foreplay for your next big idea.
Creative Insider is a weekly hit of ideas, opinions and inconvenient truths designed to wake up whatever your last workshop put to sleep.
(and whatever fresh nonsense the internet has served up this week)
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