Website Design & Development
Custom-designed, hand-built sites — no bloated templates. Responsive on every device, fast on every connection, easy for you to keep current.
Design & development →
BLACK BUOY EST. NEW HAMPSHIRE
Web design & development · NH Seacoast
Your business deserves better than an outdated website.
Too many great seacoast businesses are stuck with slow, dated sites — or agency quotes that don't make sense for a local company. Black Buoy builds beautiful, easy-to-navigate websites at a fraction of typical agency cost, engineered to be found in the way people actually search today.
Why Black Buoy
Craftsmanship without the agency markup.
Black Buoy is a web design and development studio in coastal southern New Hampshire. We build websites for local businesses that look sharp, load fast, and turn visitors into customers — at pricing a small business can actually justify.
And because search itself is changing, every site we build is structured to show up where people ask questions now: answer-driven search tools, not just the classic results page.
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Design that earns trust
Clean, modern, easy to navigate — a site that makes your business look as good as the work you do.
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A fraction of agency pricing
Transparent, honest pricing built for local businesses — dramatically lower than typical agency rates, with no surprise line items.
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Built for how people search today
Structured content, direct answers, and clean technical foundations so answer engines surface and cite your business.
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Local, and staying local
Coastal New Hampshire owned and operated. When you call, you talk to the people who built your site.
What we do
Three things, done exceptionally well.
Every engagement is built around the same goal: a site that looks better, loads faster, and gets found more often than anything else in your harbor.
Answer Engine Optimization
People increasingly get answers instead of links. AEO structures your site so those answer-driven tools find you, cite you, and send you customers.
How AEO works →Ongoing Site Care
Hosting guidance, updates, security, content changes, and a real person to call. Your site stays fast, safe, and current — you stay focused on the business.
Care plans →
Registered LLC
A real New Hampshire business, in it for the long haul
Founder-built, start to finish
Hutson Jones & Gardner Thornhill design and build every site personally
Coastal NH owned & operated
Serving Portsmouth, Rye, New Castle, Hampton, and the greater seacoast
The shift in search
People don't just search anymore. They ask.
When someone wants "the best boat detailer near Hampton" or "a family dentist in Portsmouth that takes new patients," they increasingly type the whole question into an answer-driven search tool — the kind often called an LLM, or large language model — and get back one direct answer, not ten blue links.
If your website isn't structured for those tools to read, understand, and cite, you're invisible in the fastest-growing way customers look for local businesses.
What is Answer Engine Optimization?
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring a website — its content, markup, and technical foundations — so that modern answer-driven search tools (LLMs, or large language models) can find it, understand it, and cite it when people ask questions. For a local business, that means showing up as the answer, not one option on page two.
Ready for a website that pulls its weight?
Tell us about your business. We'll take a look at your current site — if you have one — and come back with a straightforward plan and an honest quote.