When Paul founded Livetech in 2000, the idea of running a full-service digital agency from a coastal town in North Wales would have struck most people in the industry as eccentric at best. The web design and digital marketing world was centred on London and the South East, with a secondary cluster forming in Manchester. Agencies that wanted serious clients were expected to have serious addresses.
Twenty-five years later, Livetech operates from Trinity Square in Llandudno, holds Google Partner status, serves clients ranging from local independents to national organisations, and employs a team that would rather be here than anywhere else. The agency’s longevity is not just a story about one business — it is evidence that the model works.
Starting Before the Infrastructure Existed
Livetech’s founding predates almost everything that makes remote and regional business viable today. In 2000, broadband in North Wales was largely theoretical. Cloud computing did not exist in any practical sense. Video conferencing was unreliable and expensive. The idea of a client in London or Manchester trusting their web presence to an agency they had never visited in person, in a town they might not be able to locate on a map, required a level of persuasion that would not be necessary today.
The early years were built on craft and reputation. Livetech produced websites that worked — technically solid, well-designed, and effective at doing what business websites needed to do at a time when many companies were still uncertain about whether they needed one at all. Word of mouth carried. Clients who started with a basic website came back for redesigns, then for SEO, then for broader marketing support. The relationships that formed in those early years — some of which persist today — were built on delivery, not geography.
The Client Portfolio
The breadth of Livetech’s client base demonstrates something important about what is achievable from a North Wales location. The agency’s portfolio spans sectors and scales in a way that would be unremarkable for a London agency but that challenges assumptions about what a regional firm can handle, much broader than the traditional go-to starter website design.
Drew Pritchard, the antiques dealer and television presenter known to millions through the Salvage Hunters series, has his digital presence managed by Livetech. That is a client whose brand operates nationally and internationally, whose audience spans multiple countries, and whose online presence needs to function as both a commercial platform and an extension of a media personality. It is not the kind of account that typically ends up with a small-town agency — unless that agency consistently delivers.
Watkin Jones Property Developments, one of North Wales’s established building firms, represents the kind of long-term regional client relationship that sustains an agency through economic cycles. Inigo Jones Slateworks, a heritage business producing Welsh slate products, brings a different challenge — communicating craft and provenance in a digital medium. North Wales Police has trusted Livetech with aspects of its digital presence, a public sector client that demands reliability, compliance, and a level of institutional seriousness that is non-negotiable.
The Imperial Hotel in Llandudno, Network Yacht Brokers, Gwynedd Forklifts, Conwy Mind, WE Cycle — the list reflects not just variety but the trust that comes from an agency being embedded in its community while simultaneously operating at a professional standard that satisfies clients with no connection to the region at all.
More recently, Livetech has worked with GE Tools on branding and marketing for PPE Store, expanding into e-commerce territory that puts the agency in direct competition with specialist digital firms in major cities. The Oasis Hotel, Talhenbont Hall, West Point Holiday Park — hospitality clients whose businesses depend on their web presence converting browsers into bookers.
The Network Effect
One of Livetech’s more distinctive strategic decisions has been the creation and management of a network of North Wales websites. Rather than simply building sites for clients, the agency invested in its own regional web infrastructure — a portfolio of sites covering towns, industries, and topics across the region. Llandudno.com itself is part of this network, as are sites covering other communities and sectors in North Wales.
This is not typical agency behaviour, and it reflects an understanding of digital marketing that goes beyond client-by-client service delivery. The network functions as a genuine editorial and directory resource for the region, while simultaneously creating the kind of topical authority and interlinking structure that underpins modern SEO strategy. For clients, being part of a connected regional web ecosystem provides visibility and link equity that a standalone website cannot generate on its own.
It also means Livetech is not just a service provider to North Wales businesses — it is actively building the digital infrastructure that makes the region more visible, more discoverable, and more commercially viable online. That is an unusual position for an agency of any size, and it is one that would be significantly harder to occupy from a London office.
Services Beyond Web Design
The agency’s service offering has evolved considerably from its origins in web design. Livetech now provides SEO strategy and implementation, pay-per-click advertising management as a Google Partner, social media marketing and management, commercial photography and video production including aerial drone footage, website maintenance and hosting, e-commerce development across platforms including WordPress, WooCommerce, and Shopify, and most recently, AI consultancy and implementation services.
That last addition is telling. Livetech has positioned itself at the front of the AI adoption curve for businesses, offering practical guidance on how organisations can integrate artificial intelligence into their operations — not as a theoretical exercise, but as a working tool. For a twenty-five-year-old agency in a North Wales coastal town to be offering AI consultancy alongside traditional web services speaks to the kind of continuous adaptation that defines businesses that survive and grow over decades.
What the Livetech Story Proves
The significance of Livetech’s story, for the purposes of anyone considering Llandudno or North Wales as a business location, is not that it is exceptional. It is that it is replicable.
The agency was founded before the infrastructure existed to make it easy. It survived the dot-com bust, the 2008 financial crisis, the pandemic, and the ongoing restructuring of the digital marketing industry by larger platforms and AI tools. It did this from a small town on the North Wales coast, without the safety net of a London address or the critical mass of a major city’s business ecosystem.
What Livetech had, and continues to have, is the ability to produce work of a standard that makes geography irrelevant to the client. When the website loads fast, the SEO strategy delivers results, and the marketing campaign generates enquiries, no client cares whether the team that produced it is sitting in Soho or Trinity Square.
The agency also demonstrates the compounding advantage of being embedded in a community over the long term. Twenty-five years of presence in Llandudno has created a depth of local knowledge, a network of relationships, and a reputation that no new entrant — however well-funded — could replicate quickly. That combination of local rootedness and professional capability operating at a national standard is precisely what makes the North Wales business model sustainable.
For founders considering a move to the region, Livetech is evidence that the theory translates into practice. A serious business, serving serious clients, built and sustained from a location that offers its team a life most city-based agencies can only envy.
The agency can be found at livetech.co.uk.
This article is part of a series exploring business, enterprise, and innovation in Llandudno and North Wales.
