“Editorial quality” is a phrase that's gotten flatter over time. Originally it meant the standard a small magazine held itself to — considered typography, real photographs, body copy that read like a person wrote it, layout that breathed, and a point of view about what was worth saying. Then web design adopted it, and it became shorthand for “not Comic Sans”. That's not what we mean.
What we mean is the actual editorial standard, applied to a small business website. The standard a magazine like Apartamento or The Gentlewomanwould hold a page to. The standard the customer notices when they walk past a well-printed shop window, even if they couldn't name what was good about it. The standard that means a site stops looking like a site and starts looking like a piece of considered design.
i. Typography
The typography is the first place editorial quality gets tested. Most small business sites ship with the default fonts of the theme they're built on, paired without much thought, set at the size and leading the theme picked. Editorial quality means typography that was chosen: a heading face and a body face that work together, not because the theme paired them but because they were considered as a pair. Set at a size that's comfortable to read on the page that owns it. Leading that lets the text breathe. Measure that doesn't go past 75 characters. Spacing that respects the kind of business you are.
A florist's site shouldn't use the same type as a law firm's.A jewellery shop shouldn't use the same type as a CrossFit gym. The fact that this needs saying tells you how often it's ignored.
ii. Photographs
The second test is photography. Most small business sites use stock photographs of generic businesses doing generic things — a smiling woman with a clipboard, a man in a hi-vis jacket pointing at a roof, a couple drinking coffee in a window seat. The photograph isn't of the business. It's of a business. Customers can clock the difference in a second.
Editorial quality means photographs that are of your business, in your register. The workshop, the front of house, the product close-up, the team. If you have your own — and many small businesses do — we use those. They're always better. If you don't, we generate imagery that fits the brief, in your visual language, of plausible workshops and products and environments. Never stock.
iii. Layout
The third test is the layout itself. Most small business sites are built from a small number of preset blocks — hero block, three-column feature block, testimonial block, CTA block — stacked on top of each other in roughly the same order, with the customer's details swapped in. The result feels modular because it is. Customers can clock that in a second too.
The result feels modular because it is. Customers can clock that in a second too.
Editorial quality means each page is composed for the page it has to do. The homepage of a florist isn't the same shape as the homepage of a chiropractor, because the things they need to say are different shapes. The way the testimonials sit, the way the photographs interact with the body copy, the way the navigation reveals itself, the way the page breaks for mobile — all considered, all bespoke, all chosen rather than stamped.
iv. Voice
The fourth test is the easiest to fail and the hardest to fake: voice. Body copy that sounds like a human wrote it, in the register the business actually has, talking about what the business actually does. Not “experience the difference”; not “passionate about quality”; not the empty middle-voice of the small-business website template. Real sentences, in the tone of voice the owner actually uses, about the work the owner actually does.
This is where most generated content fails. The early AI-written sites had a tell — a flatness, a templated middle-voice, an over-reach for marketing register. By the spring of 2025 that was no longer inevitable, if the brief was carefully set and the post-generation editorial review was rigorous. We hold every site to the standard that no sentence on it should make a real reader wince. If a sentence wouldn't survive editing, it doesn't ship.
v. Why it matters
It matters because small businesses deserve craft as much as the well-known names do. The florist on Mare Street is a more interesting story than half the FTSE 100. Her site should be a more interesting site. The fact that she can't afford a £30,000 design project shouldn't mean she has to settle for a templated wrapper. The technology has caught up; the standard hasn't followed by default.We hold the standard so that the customer doesn't have to ask for it.
If you want to see what the standard looks like applied to nineteen different briefs, the showcase is the place. If you want to read your way through the rest of the issue, the contents page has six more pieces.