ServicesSan Diego, CA
Web design and AI for San Diego businesses.
Carlsbad Web & AI builds custom websites and Ada AI assistants for businesses in San Diego, California. We are a small North County studio, not a downtown agency, and we work at neighbourhood scale — North Park, Little Italy, Point Loma, Ocean Beach. OMBAC Rugby is a live San Diego client. Builds start at $649 plus $39 monthly.
- Size
- Second largest city in California
- Client
- OMBAC Rugby, on the coast since 1954
- Market
- The most contested we sell into
- Studio
- Forty minutes north, in Carlsbad
32.7157° N — 117.1611° W / San Diego, California
01 — Who this is for
Built for these people.
- Neighbourhood restaurants, bars, and shops competing inside one district rather than the whole city
- Clubs, associations, and member organisations with a decade of history and no site to hold it
- Independent practices and studios priced out of a downtown agency retainer
- Businesses whose current agency stopped answering the phone after launch
02 — What it sounds like
If you have said one of these, you are in the right place.
“We got a quote from a downtown agency and it was five figures before anyone drew anything.”
“Our site was built by someone who has stopped replying and we cannot get into it.”
“We are one of forty in North Park and we look like the other thirty-nine.”
“There is seventy years of history here and none of it is on the website.”
03 — What you get
The same build, wherever you are.
01
A custom design, drawn for the business
No template, no page builder, no theme with your logo dropped into it. Layouts are drawn for what you sell and who walks in.
02
A hand-built Next.js site on Vercel
Server-rendered, so a phone on a bad connection in a parking lot gets the page, not a loading spinner.
03
Up to five core pages
Home, the thing you actually sell, proof, about, contact. Structured for how people read before they call.
04
A CMS you can edit yourself
Change hours, prices, and a phone number without emailing us. Holiday hours are not a support ticket.
05
Local structured data
LocalBusiness schema with your real address, hours, and service area, so search engines and assistants get it from the source.
06
Mobile, keyboard, and screen-reader testing
Before launch, on real devices. Every page has to work with a keyboard alone.
07
Ada, if you want her
The AI assistant that answers questions on your site at 11pm and hands you the transcript. Optional, $499 to build, then $49 a month, never bolted on by surprise.
04 — Getting found in San Diego
What being findable here actually takes.
01
Do not chase the city. Win the neighbourhood
Nobody small ranks for San Diego web design, or San Diego anything, and pretending otherwise burns a year. North Park, Point Loma, Ocean Beach and Little Italy are searched as separate places with a fraction of the competition, and they are where your customers actually are.
02
The map pack is proximity-first, so pick your fight
Map results are ranked against where the person is standing, not where the city centre is. A business in Point Loma competes with Point Loma, not with downtown. That is good news, and it means your profile and your neighbourhood page matter far more than any citywide keyword.
03
Depth beats breadth in a big market
Against forty competitors, the page that wins is the one that answers the question completely — price, process, what is not included, what happens next. Thin pages lose here in a way they do not in a small town.
04
History and membership are content nobody else has
An archive, a roster, a fixture list, seventy years of results. For clubs and long-standing businesses this is the most defensible ranking asset available, because no competitor can copy it. It is exactly what we built for OMBAC.
05 — Proof
Built for San Diego. Open it and look.
Client work2026
OMBAC Rugby
San Diego rugby club, est. 1954 - static build on Vercel
The seventy-year-old San Diego rugby club, online properly: a match-day home page, a fixture hub, a full senior squad, a decade-by-decade archive back to 1954, a USA Eagles alumni wall, a youth pathway, and a join form that reaches a volunteer.
Concept demo
Shakespeare Pub & Grille
Concept demo - British pub, San Diego
An unsolicited concept demo for San Diego's oldest British pub: a six-page site where the tap wall, the quiz calendar and tonight's special are data rather than pages, and the home page tells you what is on before you have scrolled.
Self-directed concept demo. Not commissioned, not reviewed by the business, and not a client.
06 — How it runs
Four steps, in this order.
Step 01
Audit and brief
We look at your site, your map listing, and the competitors outranking you, and send the findings in writing before anyone designs anything. Free, and yours whether or not you hire us.
Step 02
Design
Layouts for the pages that matter, in your colours and your type. Two rounds of revisions, then it locks and we build.
Step 03
Build
Hand-coded in Next.js. Content goes into a CMS you can edit, and we test on real phones and with a keyboard before you see it.
Step 04
Launch and hand over
We point the domain, watch it for a week, and hand you the keys. You own the code and the accounts. Leaving is a repo transfer, not a negotiation.
07 — Scope and price
Same prices. No zip-code markup.
A five-page custom site is from $649 to build and $39 a month to host, maintain, and keep updated. Adding Ada, the AI assistant, makes it from $949 to build, then $79 a month. Ada on an existing site is $499 to build, then $49 a month. Larger sites — archives, rosters, catalogues — run past five pages and are counted and quoted before we start.
Anything outside that gets quoted in writing before we start, not discovered halfway through. Every plan and every number is published.
08 — Questions
Before you ask.
- Why hire a Carlsbad studio instead of a San Diego agency?
- Price and attention, and you should weigh both honestly. A downtown agency will out-resource us. What we do is publish our prices, put a senior person on the work rather than an account manager, and hand you the code at the end. If you need a large team and a retainer, hire the agency. If you have been quoted five figures for a five-page site, talk to us first.
- Can you actually rank us for San Diego web searches?
- Not for the broadest citywide terms, and anyone promising that is selling you something. What works in a market this size is neighbourhood and service-level pages plus a properly built Google Business Profile, because map results are ranked by proximity to the person searching. We will tell you which terms are realistic before you spend anything.
- Is OMBAC a real client or another demo?
- A real client. It began as an unsolicited concept demo from this studio, the club took it on, and it is now the club's own site — a match-day home page, a fixture hub, the senior squad, a decade-by-decade archive back to 1954, and a USA Eagles alumni wall. The Shakespeare Pub site also on this page is a concept demo and is labelled as one everywhere it appears.
- Who owns the site when it is done?
- You do. The code, the domain, the analytics, and the hosting account are all in your name, and the repository transfers to you on request. The monthly fee buys hosting and maintenance, not custody of your website.
09 — Start with the audit
Find out what is actually broken.
Send one San Diego URL and we will tell you the five things costing you the most, in writing, whether or not you hire us. We reply within two business days.
32.7157° N — 117.1611° W — San Diego, CA / built from 33.1581° N — 117.3506° W