Enquiries about ExpressionEngine support in Bath usually come down to one thing, a site that was built properly once and hasn't had proper attention since.
Karl's the one who looks at it. Nothing but ExpressionEngine and Craft CMS since he started Expression 37 in 2007, and he doesn't pass jobs to anyone else.
Before anything gets recommended, Karl goes through the actual codebase. What happens next depends on what he finds, a fix, an upgrade, or an ongoing retainer.
Where we typically come in:
- Hotels and tour operators with online booking built on ExpressionEngine, where downtime during peak season is a direct financial hit.
- Wellness and spa venues running appointment or availability systems that need to stay reliable under seasonal demand.
- Publishing and professional services firms with content-heavy sites that need ongoing editorial and technical support.
- Businesses taking deposits or bookings through Stripe, where a checkout fault has an immediate, visible cost.
- Owners who want fast answers during busy periods, not a support ticket sitting in a queue while a booking window closes.
How a typical engagement starts:
Bath enquiries often follow a near miss during a busy period: a booking form that struggled under bank holiday load, an EE install flagged as insecure, or simply the realisation nobody's checked the site properly in years. Karl audits the real codebase before quoting, and tourism-facing businesses in particular tend to move quickly to ongoing retainer support once the risk is clear.
Common questions Bath clients ask:
Does it matter that you're not based in Bath?
Not for the work itself. Booking system fixes, deployments, and ongoing maintenance all happen remotely, and response time matters far more here than physical location.
Our booking system struggles during peak tourist season, is that actually fixable?
In most cases, yes. It's usually a specific issue, hosting that isn't sized for the load, an unoptimised database query, rather than a fundamental flaw in how the site was built.
What happens if something breaks during a busy weekend?
Retainer clients get priority response for exactly that kind of issue, since a broken booking system on a peak weekend is a genuine emergency for a tourism business, not an inconvenience.
How urgent is upgrading if our EE version is quite old?
Security is the priority regardless of version. Beyond that, older installs run into add-ons that have stopped being maintained, which becomes the practical issue when an upgrade's finally needed.
Do you look after the deposit and payment side too, or just the general site?
Both, they're usually built into the same templates, so separating them tends to miss where the actual problems come from.
How does pricing work for a seasonal business like ours?
A monthly retainer that covers you year round tends to suit seasonal businesses well, since the cost stays predictable even though the workload isn't. Project work is quoted separately as a fixed cost.
What's a good first step?
A short call about how the site performs during your busiest periods, its EE version, and what's prompting the enquiry.
Ready to get started?
If your website is business-critical and needs a specialist who will take proper long-term ownership of it, get in touch. Karl will respond personally and give you an honest view of how we can help.
