Edinburgh has been doing AI since the sixties
- Freddy the robot, 1969
- Skyscanner and FanDuel started here
- The world’s largest arts festival
- A tech incubator under the castle
How Edinburgh grew
The short version, in order. Pick a year.
The Festival and the Fringe
The Edinburgh International Festival is founded, and eight uninvited companies turn up and perform anyway. That gatecrashing became the Fringe, now the largest arts festival in the world.
Freddy the robot, and the start of British AI
British artificial intelligence research began in a small group at 4 Hope Park Square in 1963, led by Donald Michie, who had worked alongside Alan Turing in the codebreaking huts at Bletchley Park. By 1966 it was a full Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception.
Its most famous product was Freddy, a robot with a television eye and a pincer hand, built through the late sixties and seventies. Freddy could look at a heap of parts and assemble a toy car from them. Getting a machine to see a jumble of objects and work out what to do about it was, at the time, close to science fiction.
Edinburgh has been doing this for sixty years, which is why so much modern AI work still has an Edinburgh accent.
What that means if you trade in Edinburgh
Edinburgh is two economies wearing one skyline. There is the year-round city of finance, law, universities and the people who serve them, and there is the visitor economy that swells enormously each August.
Which one you sell to should be obvious from your first sentence. A festival-season business and a firm with a client list need almost opposite websites.
What Edinburgh businesses ask us for
Pick your season
If August is your quarter, say so and take bookings early. If it is your quietest month, say that too.
Old Town or New Town
Access, parking and expectations differ street by street. Local detail signals you actually work here.
Be bookable
Fixed-length services in a visitor city benefit more from online booking than almost anywhere else in Britain.
The tech scene here
Edinburgh has an unusually long memory for a tech city. The university has been doing artificial intelligence since the 1960s, without much interruption, and the informatics school it grew into is one of the largest in Europe.
The commercial side followed: Skyscanner and FanDuel both started here, and the pattern since has been fintech, data and travel rather than consumer apps. Money helps — Edinburgh is one of the largest financial centres in Europe, and a good deal of the local technology work is bought by it.
For a small business that means customers who are comfortable online, and a market where looking amateur is unusually costly.
Where people work
The startup cluster is compact and largely in the shadow of the castle.
CodeBase
Launched in 2014 and now one of the country’s largest tech incubators, sitting under Edinburgh Castle. It has supported well over 500 startups and scaleups between them raising billions.
The university’s informatics cluster
One of the largest computer science and AI schools in Europe, and the reason so much of the city’s technology talent never leaves.
Edinburgh’s festivals
August is not a normal month here, and any business trading in the city should plan around that rather than be surprised by it.
The Festival Fringe
The largest arts festival in the world, grown from eight uninvited companies who turned up in 1947 and performed anyway. It is open access — anyone can register a show.
The International Festival
The invited festival that the Fringe grew up around, founded the same year and running each August.
How local businesses use their sites
It changes by trade, but the website is nearly always the first contact — and usually the only one before someone spends money.
Trades and home services
The areas you cover, photos of real jobs, and a phone number you can see without scrolling.
Clinics, salons and studios
People expect to book online rather than ring during working hours.
Shops, cafés and bars
In August your opening hours change and your footfall multiplies. The site has to keep up.
Professional and B2B services
A large financial sector means buyers who check. Be precise and be easy to verify.
Why FastSites works here
Edinburgh is a city that notices detail, and a website is mostly detail. One page, done properly, live in days, at a price published before you speak to anyone.
Built for phones, built light, and written so you can name Leith, Stockbridge, Morningside or Portobello and turn up when someone there searches.
How well do you know Edinburgh?
Five quick questions. Get all five right and you win a 10% off discount code for your website. Every answer is somewhere on this page, so have a read if you get stuck.
Edinburgh quiz · 1 of 5
Edinburgh’s Freddy, built from 1969, was an early example of what?
Common questions
The simplest one-page site starts at £15 a month, with the website build included and nothing to pay up front. Every plan and its price is published on the pricing page before you speak to anyone.
Sign-up takes about 3 minutes and the build questionnaire about 5. Most sites are then designed and built within 21 hours, and live within days of the brief being answered.
No setup fee and no hidden extras. Your monthly plan covers the website build and hosting. Done-for-you plans have a 12-month minimum term, then you can cancel any time from your dashboard.
Yes — you can upgrade at any time as your business grows, with no need to start over.