About

Thirty years of design and search. One person, one studio.

INKON is a one-person studio in Thornton-Cleveleys. I'm John. I started with a scalpel and a sheet of rub-down letters, and I now run a website studio where AI does the repetitive work and I do the part that needs a person. This page is who you'd be working with.

The story

Thirty years of putting businesses in front of customers.

1993 Letraset
A graphic designer at fifteen, self-taught on Letraset, spray mount and printing plates. Running a publisher's studio by nineteen.
1998 The first websites
Peter's rule, learned that year and never dropped: make it look beautiful, make the offer visible, and it turns into new business.
2000s The agency years
Harrods' website from a rooftop office in Knightsbridge. A search engine for UK trades, built before Google reached this country. Then Freebird in Fleetwood: a decade of local firms given websites built to a department-store standard.
2011 National-scale search
The voucher-code space, one of the most cut-throat corners of Google. Two Google resets that wiped out half the internet's rankings, both rebuilt.
2025 INKON
The company registered on 7 February. Everything learned in thirty years written down and built into how it works.
2026 The AI age
The studio goes live on 18 June: one person, a team of AI agents, and Violet, INKON's AI assistant. Three client sites live by September. Howard's converts.

In my own words

What I actually do for you.

Hi, I'm John

I ran an agency for years. Now I run INKON on my own, and what makes that possible is six months of building the thing behind it: Violet, who answers your enquiries; the systems that put technical SEO into a site rather than bolting it on afterwards; the checks that go over every build before it goes live and catch what would otherwise quietly cost you work. That machinery is built and paid for. Every client gets all of it from day one, rather than paying an agency to assemble a worse version from scratch. AI is a tool to me, nothing more. It is what lets one person do agency work with my name on every part of it. I used to write the quotes at the other end of this, and Howard's site would have left my old agency at ten thousand pounds, before anyone had touched the content.

I'm not selling my time. I'm selling what the website does for you. Our first meeting is about your business, not mine: what kind of work you want more of, and who you want ringing. Then I get under the skin of what has to be true on the page before those people trust you. A tradesperson's customer wants to know they won't get ripped off. A couple wants to know their wedding will be a party nobody forgets. I work that out, then I make a plan to get you there. It is exactly what I did for Howard, and it is why his site is working.

While your build is on, it has my full attention. The picture of what it needs to feel like starts forming before we've even met. Nothing you tell me gets lost, because the AI listens to our meeting so I don't have to take notes, and it helps me check the voice and the structure against what you actually said. Then I direct the build and get it right before you see anything. You are never passed on to a designer who has never heard of you.

People tell me they get twenty calls a week about AI websites built in ten minutes. Howard's took three weeks. There is a lot going on behind the scenes, and all of it is for you.

John Stirzaker, INKON Founder

The rule that never changed

Make it look beautiful. Make the offer visible.

"Make it look beautiful, and make the offer visible, so it turns into new business."
Peter Toner's rule, learned in 1998. Every INKON build still follows it.

Most agencies start from scratch on every job and keep what they learn in somebody's head. I don't. Everything I have learned in thirty-odd years of design and search is written down and built into how INKON works, so you get the benefit of it on day one. When something works for one business it gets written back in, and the next piece of your work starts from a better place than the last.

The methods that win in brutal, national-scale search are mostly absent from local business marketing. Bringing them to a plumber in Poulton or a salon in Lytham is an unfair advantage. Yours, not your competitors'.

How I work

Quick, direct, no waffle.

Outcomes, in plain English. You'll hear "enquiries", "rankings" and "reply time", not deliverables decks.
Every price published. If it's not on the pricing page, it doesn't cost anything.
The meetings that matter, none that don't. A proper kick-off, then preview links and quick replies. On Accelerate, a strategy call every quarter.
Built lean, never outsourced. One person with the full toolkit and no agency overheads, which is why the prices look the way they do. The thinking is mine.
Checked before it goes live. Every build ends with INKON's own technical check. If it doesn't pass, it doesn't launch.
Reachable. Emails come to me. Nobody in between.

The name is literal. Ink is where the career started and it never left: alongside the studio I run my own print-on-demand brands, GYMHOOD® and the INKON Print Store.

In their words

Two clients, in their own words.

“John gets as excited as you do. Anybody I work with, if they're excited, I'm excited. You know it's going to be a great outcome.”

Howard Wing Wedding singer and host, howardwing.co.uk

“Absolutely perfect work. This company went above and beyond to incorporate all my requests. Nothing was too much trouble and the finished product is 5*.”

Lee Wilson L Wilson Digital & Security

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