Reading is the one market on this list where the person evaluating your website may well build websites for a living, or work beside someone who does. The M4 corridor between Theale and Maidenhead is dense with software, telecoms and IT services, and the business parks at Green Park and Thames Valley Park are full of technically literate buyers. They will notice a slow page, a stock photo they have seen before, and a claim with no evidence under it. That raises the floor on what a site here has to be, and it lowers the value of anything decorative.
It also changes the sales job. In a tech-literate market the buyer usually self-qualifies before contacting anyone, so the site has to let them finish that job without help: what the product or service actually does, who it is for, what it integrates with, and roughly what it costs. Hiding all of that behind a demo request does not create pipeline here, it creates a bounce. We would rather publish the price band and lose the enquiries that were never going to close.
The practical reason we can serve Reading properly is that it is forty minutes from the studio, straight down the M4 from Egham. Workshops, kick-off sessions and the awkward mid-project meeting where scope needs settling can all happen in person, which is worth more on a technical project than on a brochure site.