Every British Web Design website is its own Laravel application, written in PHP, with its own admin panel, database and code repository. British Web Design builds the sites with Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, and a person checks the result. The sites are hosted on servers in London and Manchester, and they are not WordPress sites or pages inside a website builder.
What the sites run on
| Part | What British Web Design uses |
|---|---|
| Framework | Laravel, a PHP framework |
| Admin panel | Laravel Nova, one for each site |
| Styling | Tailwind CSS |
| Servers | London and Manchester, run by British Web Design over SSH |
| Code | A private GitHub repository for each site |
| Domains and DNS | Cloudflare |
| Postmark | |
| Card payments | Stripe Connect |
| Bookings | British Web Design's own booking system, with Google Calendar |
| Images and backups | Amazon S3 |
| Speed and search | Google PageSpeed Insights, Google Analytics and Google Search Console |
| Writing and building | Claude, by Anthropic, checked by a person |
In October 2026 the British Web Design site template ran on Laravel 13, Laravel Nova 5 and Tailwind CSS 4.
One template, one repository per site
Every British Web Design site starts from one site template, a Laravel application that British Web Design maintains. Each site gets a private GitHub repository made from that template, its own MySQL database and its own file storage, and one site cannot reach another site's code. Booking, payments and the shop are British Web Design's own Laravel packages, shared by every site.
Every British Web Design site is hosted twice. The staging copy, at an address ending in on-britishwebs.com, is where every change lands first. The live site is on the owner's own domain, with a separate database, and nothing reaches it until the owner approves it. The owner opens the site's admin panel with one click from the British Web Design dashboard.
How Claude builds a site
- A person at British Web Design reads the owner's brief (their words, the business details, colours, typefaces and photographs) and approves the build.
- Claude Code, Anthropic's coding tool, works in a copy of the site's repository. For a new design it researches the trade and good sites like it, writes a design plan, then builds the pages, the words and the layout. Its tools are limited to the site's own files and a few checks, and its time is capped.
- The work is opened as a pull request on GitHub, and a person reviews it before it is merged.
- The change is deployed to the staging copy, and the owner approves it to go live.
Stock photographs come from Unsplash and Pixabay under their own licences, and words and images from an owner's existing website can be carried across. Account passwords, card details and visitors' data are never sent to Anthropic.
Email, backups and monitoring
Each British Web Design site sends email through its own Postmark server, from an address at its own domain, and also stores every enquiry in its database. Every live site's database is backed up on a schedule into private, encrypted Amazon S3 storage used only for backups, and again before every release; staging copies are not backed up. Errors on any site go to British Web Design's own error tracker, with passwords, tokens, cookies and card numbers removed first. Every site is tested with Google PageSpeed Insights after each release and every day, and the scores are shown on the owner's dashboard.
Why not WordPress
A WordPress site is a theme plus plugins, and both need updating for as long as the site runs. A British Web Design site has no plugin marketplace and no third-party plugins to keep up to date: British Web Design updates Laravel, the site's packages and the server as part of the monthly price. The pages are drawn by the application rather than by a theme loading plugins, which keeps them fast.
The trade-off is stated on the British Web Design website. Laravel is not a content management system, so there is no drag-and-drop editor. Owners edit text, prices, hours and photographs themselves and ask British Web Design for anything larger. For someone who wants a plugin marketplace or a drag-and-drop editor, or who wants to run the site and publish to it daily themselves, WordPress is the better fit.
The code for each site stays in British Web Design's private repository and runs on British Web Design's hosting as part of the service, and access to it is not part of the standard service. The words, the images and the domain name are the owner's to keep.
Questions
Is a British Web Design website built on WordPress?
No. Every British Web Design website is a Laravel application written in PHP, with its own Laravel Nova admin panel. There are no WordPress plugins or themes to update, because British Web Design updates the framework and the server itself.
Does British Web Design use AI to build websites?
Yes. British Web Design builds each site from the owner's brief with Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic. A person reads the brief before the build and reviews the result before the owner is asked to look at it, and nothing goes live until the owner approves it.
Sources
- Why Laravel
- Compared with WordPress
- Human-checked AI websites
- Features
- Privacy & GDPR, for the services that handle data
- Terms of service, for who owns what
- Laravel, Laravel Nova and Tailwind CSS
- Stripe Connect and Postmark
- Claude, by Anthropic
- Google PageSpeed Insights