Liverpool wrote the games Britain grew up on
- Bug-Byte, Imagine and Psygnosis
- The Baltic Triangle — 200+ digital firms
- The UK’s largest contemporary art festival
- A 450-acre innovation district
How Liverpool grew
The short version, in order. Pick a year.
Bug-Byte
One of the first British software houses of the bedroom-coding era set up in Liverpool, and a generation of programmers came through it.
Bug-Byte, Imagine, Psygnosis
Bug-Byte was set up in Liverpool in 1980, among the first professional games companies in Britain, and published Manic Miner in 1983. Two of its people left to found Imagine Software in 1982, which burned brightly, spent extravagantly and went bankrupt in July 1984.
Out of that wreckage came Psygnosis, founded later the same year, which became one of the defining British studios of the sixteen-bit era — technically show-off, generous with extras, wrapped in Roger Dean cover art you could spot across a shop.
A generation of British programmers learned their trade in that chain of companies, in one city, in under five years.
What that means if you trade in Liverpool
Liverpool sells on personality more than most cities, and that is not a cliché you can ignore when writing a website. A page here that sounds corporate is actively working against you.
The businesses that do well online in this city write the way they talk, put their faces on the page, and let the tone do work that a stock photograph cannot.
What Liverpool businesses ask us for
Write like you speak
Formality reads as distance here. Plain, warm and direct converts better.
Faces on the page
People buy from the person. A real photograph of you beats any amount of branding.
Say your patch
Wirral, Sefton and the city centre are separate markets. Be specific about which you serve.
The tech scene here
Liverpool’s digital economy grew out of games and music rather than finance, and it still shows. Studios, agencies, audio, film and a strong independent streak — plus a serious research cluster on the health and life-sciences side.
The Baltic Triangle is the visible part: a former industrial quarter now holding a couple of hundred digital, media and design companies alongside music venues and studios. The Knowledge Quarter is the other half — 450 acres of universities, hospitals and research, run as a single innovation district.
For a small firm the read is that people here can tell craft from padding. Show the work.
Where people work
Two clusters, ten minutes apart, with quite different characters.
Baltic Creative CIC
Set up specifically to keep space affordable for creative and digital businesses in the city region — studios, coworking, meeting rooms and around seventy companies across the campus.
The Baltic Triangle
The wider quarter: two hundred-odd digital, media and design firms sharing streets with independent markets, venues and workshops.
Knowledge Quarter Liverpool
The innovation district covering Paddington Village and the Fabric District, jointly run by the council, the two universities, the School of Tropical Medicine and the NHS trust.
Liverpool’s festivals
A city that does public events better than almost anywhere its size.
Liverpool Biennial
The UK’s largest festival of contemporary visual art, running every two years since 1998 across galleries, public spaces and buildings that are not usually open.
Sound City
An independent music festival and industry conference that has been running since 2008, held across venues in the city centre.
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
Menus, stock, hours and location — current, and readable on a small screen.
Creative and studio work
Portfolio first. In this city the work is the pitch, and a slow gallery kills it.
Why FastSites works here
Liverpool has a low tolerance for anything that oversells itself, and a high regard for people who are good at the thing they do. A site that shows the work and loads quickly does more here than one that talks.
One page, live in days, published price. Built for phones, and written so you can name Aigburth, Woolton, Allerton or the Baltic and turn up when someone there searches.
How well do you know Liverpool?
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.
Liverpool quiz · 1 of 5
Which Liverpool studio made Lemmings and Wipeout?
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.