Birmingham, United Kingdom--(Newsfile Corp. - September 10, 2025) - An AI-powered web design service aimed at small businesses is launching into a market that still contains a surprising offline minority. Opace Ltd (trading as Web-Site.Design) today announces an AI-assisted pay monthly web design service based on the Website-as-a-Service (WaaS) subscription model for UK small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The new service combines automation for repeatable production tasks with human oversight for strategy, accessibility, quality assurance and content.

The context is clear enough: the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology's latest UK Business Data Survey 2024 estimates that 68% of UK businesses have a website, leaving roughly a third without a basic web presence. When set against the Department for Business and Trade's Business Population Estimates 2024 of 5.5 million private-sector businesses, the gap equates to around 1.76 million potential stragglers.

The company released an accompanying infographic, The £658.2m Untapped Market: AI-Powered Website-as-a-Service (WaaS) for UK SMEs, summarising this opportunity and the practical barriers reported by smaller firms: time, skills, compliance and trust.

Infographic highlighting the AI-Human hybrid WaaS model

To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit:
https://images.newsfilecorp.com/files/11136/265694_untapped%20market%20website-as-a-service%20infographic.jpg

Provided for media use alongside this announcement, editors are free to embed the accompanying infographic. It visualises the website gap, the cost and skills barriers that lead many SMEs to delay procurement, and the split between machine speed and human judgement in the workflow. The figures are an internal estimate derived from the official adoption and population data cited above and is intended to illustrate the scale of unmet demand rather than forecasted sales.

The model itself is ordinary by design. Subscription models have become commonplace, with the "I need something, now, without a huge price tag". It's also how modern buyers prefer to pay for software, music, TV, and even cars. Websites were always going to end up here too.

"The idea of a subscription website or website-as-a-service (WaaS) is nothing new. Providers like Wix and Squarespace have been doing it for decades, by building upon the success of open-source platforms like WordPress to offer hosted solutions." said David Bryan, founder at Opace Ltd. "We believe small businesses shouldn't have to choose between a site that looks like a template and takes many days to get right, or a site that costs the same as a used car."

The solution offered by Web-Site.Design places specialised AI agents into the parts of the workflow that benefit from speed or structured iteration - research, planning, wireframes, first-pass layout, content drafts, optimisation for search engines - while retaining people for everything judgement-heavy: brand alignment, copy editing, testing, technical SEO checks, revisions, and release sign-off.

"The intent is to make web design feel more like a care plan and less like a sporadic rebuild. We began by deciding what AI should not do," comments David. "It shouldn't set strategy, approve content, test its own code or ship changes without review. That clarity is why the service exists at all."

There is a wider adoption story behind the timing. The "Business insights and impact on the UK economy: 3 April 2025" report issued by ONS explains that as of late March 2025, 18% of businesses reported currently using some form of AI, an increase of 8 percentage points since the data was first introduced in late September 2023. At the same time, AI-related revenue has soared by approximately 68% in the UK, reaching £23.9 billion in 2024, a bump of about £9.7 billion from the previous year according to the Artificial Intelligence sector study 2024.

Security and compliance pressures have also concentrated minds. The government's Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025 finds 72% of businesses now view cyber security as a high priority for senior management. For a great many SMEs, site upkeep and security are already bought-in functions; bundling them with design and content under a single monthly contract is more an administrative tidy-up than a technological leap.

Web-Site.Design's delivery process is described as an AI agent-human hybrid model, designed to address the "missing middle" as an alternative to pure AI-based website generators, agency or freelancer web design and template-based WaaS models.

The £1.8M Untapped Market: AI-Powered, Human-Perfected Website-as-a-Service (WaaS) Model for UK SMEs

Cannot view this video? Visit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o11NHchWO24

Powered by Large Language Model (LLM) providers, the onboarding process captures brand assets, pain points, priorities, goals, content if available, and functional needs. AI research agents are then set in action to discover more data about the applicant, their competitors, and their market, to create a structured project brief using the onboarding information. AI agents dedicated to website design and development then draft the bones (site structure, copy, UX, code, and even SEO) ready to be reviewed by UK-based specialists for accuracy, readability and tone before anything goes live.

Testing, QA checks, and customer feedback are included as part of final of the process to avoid the entropy that afflicts many small-business sites. "The promise here isn't novelty; it's predictability," David said.

Of the 1.76 million potential business without a website, many will be new startups, sole traders or micro businesses that lack dedicated staff with the skills to build a site.

David explains "Our solution is perfect for small businesses. AI is useful for the repetitive parts, the work that usually involves costly designers and developers, but it can't arbitrate brand nuance, spot its own hallucinations, or decide on the right trade-offs when faced with a decision. That's our job. We document those decisions so clients can see what changed and why."

Pricing is being kept simple to avoid the quote-and-haggling ritual familiar to small firms procuring web projects. The core subscription covers planning, design, build, content, technical SEO and hosting. The company says this mirrors how SMEs increasingly pay for other services like accounting, CRM, project management, and even technology infrastructure, with predictable monthly costs.

Technically, the service leans on standard, well-supported frameworks rather than experimental stacks. Content is structured for search without trying to game it, image assets are optimised, and schema is used where appropriate. Search guidance changes over time, but the principle of useful, high-quality content is stable. The team's editorial processes map to Google's public documentation on producing people-first content and avoids the shortcuts that create thin or repetitive pages.

The company is cautious about where AI is deployed. Anything that risks hallucination receives heavier human editing; long-form content for regulated sectors is drafted by people first; and AI outputs are never published without a checks for duplication and a manual pass for tone, claims and clarity. Accessibility is treated as a baseline rather than an optional extra, with regular checks for colour contrast, keyboard navigation and alt text. These are unglamorous details, but routine care is what keeps small sites usable across devices and screen sizes.

For the smallest firms, the aim is to reduce decision fatigue. Instead of multiple vendors and one-off rebuilds, the proposition is a single, simple, low-cost contract. "We want to remove any barriers for small businesses to adopt a website," David explains. "We're so confident that they will like what they see, we are requesting no upfront fees or commitment. They only sign up and pay if they are happy, and even then, we offer a 30-day money back guarantee with no questions asked."

Pricing & availability

The £50/month plan is available UK-wide, no setup fee and no additional add-on costs for plugins, hosting or content. First-draft sites land within a maximum of 1 week of intake completion; continued iteration is included until sign-off.

About Web-Site.Design

Opace Ltd, founded in 2008 in Birmingham, UK, is a digital agency specialising in AI consultancy, digital marketing, and web design. Trading under the brand Web-Site.Design, the company's mission is to make professional custom websites accessible to every small business. By combining specialist AI agents with human expertise, customers can expect sites that look sharp, load fast, and drive enquiries, without the scary upfront fee. Hosting, security, and content are all included. All that's needed to fill in a short feedback form and then get the first draft back in less than 1 week. For more information, visit https://web-site.design.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/265694