Website Design FAQs
Answers to Frequently Asked Questions.
Website Design – Our Experience & Service
We’ve designed BusinessPro & OnlineShopPro websites for businesses and organisations in many sectors, including jewellery designers, accountants, B&Bs, self-catering providers, festivals, hoteliers, fashion designers and craft groups.
All our websites are fully responsive and adapt to all screens sizes from phones to desktops. You can update your website yourself, or use our expert services to save you the time.
Unique and easy to update
We specialise in WordPress websites that look unique and are easy to update. If you don’t need WordPress, check out our SmallBusiness brochure websites.
Help & Support
We offer Website Care Plans and TimeBlocks packages to help you make the most of your website. We are always here to help and support you with your website.
Websites that grow with you
We believe WordPress websites must be future-proof, which is why yours will allow you to adapt and change it as your business grows.
Sell products online
We build WordPress e-Commerce websites that are easy for you to manage and easy for your customers to buy from.
Websites that look great on all devices
Your new website will be responsive, which means it will look and work great on all devices from smart phones to desktop PCs.
Search Engines
Search engines reward fast, secure and responsive websites with better rankings. Your website will have software to help with this built in.
Our WordPress Website Design Process
Find out what we do to bring your website to life.
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Step 6
Frequently Asked Questions
If you can’t find the answer here, get in touch.
Here are a few items that can effect the investment you will need to make:
- Numbers – pages, products, images and blog posts.
- Complexity – overall detailing and user experience.
- Functionality – eCommerce, galleries and forms.
- Bespoke or template – unique or off-the-shelf design.
- Customisation – custom programming.
- Content production – image creation and copywriting.
For the above reasons, we will ask you to tell us, honestly, what the financial investment is, that you are prepared to give to your project.
If you’re honest with us and try not to think, “How can I get my website design for a bargain?”, then we will tell you what you can expect for your investment. Unrealistic expectations waste both your and our time.
As a basic guide though, a website design without eCommerce is usually 4 weeks depending on complexity. If it’s a new eCommerce website with very few products, then another 2 weeks may be required.
In our experience though, most time is spent waiting for content, feedback and approvals. This is why we insist that as a client, you have planned and prepared everything before we start your project.
Furthermore, personal support for the first month via email and telephone is also included. After that, we offer our ‘Website Care Plans’ which are designed to make your life easier, by freeing you up to concentrate on your business and not your website.
This way you know what you’re spending and what you’ll get for your money.
Here are a few more things you might like to know:
- Every project we accept is treated with the same importance and we give everything to every project.
- We have proper ‘highbrow’ qualifications (degrees etc) and many years of real life experience in design industry. We also feel very fortunate that this job is our passion.
- If required, we can call on a team of talented experts including programmers, copywriters, SEO gurus, multi-media and social media hotshots. There aren’t many projects we can’t handle.
- We’re serious about business. We play by the book, have professional indemnity and public liability insurance, a professional accountant, and pay for premium services to ensure clients get the best solution available.
- Some design companies build sites for clients and then leave them to fend for themselves. We don’t do that. We teach our clients in how to use their website and maintain it if they chose.
- We are members of the FSB and attend industry conferences, webinars and workshops. We also listen to industry podcasts which keep us up-to-date on the latest trends and developments.
- Staff regularly enrol in industry-specific mentoring programs and invest continuously in our own work-related education.
- The technology used throughout the web and design industry is constantly changing, so we are always learning, using and maintaining the latest kit for the benefit of our clients.
- After 20 years in the design business, we pride ourselves on our honesty, reliability and eagerness to make clients happy. We start the journey together and we’ll be with you every step of the way.
Once you’ve filled out our questionnaire, we will be in touch to arrange a meeting with you locally or at our studio.
If this isn’t feasible, we have superfast broadband in the studio and can have virtual face-to-face meetings at any time.
CMS stands for Contact Management System, and although that sounds complicated, in reality, it’s not.
Basically, a CMS is designed to make managing, editing, changing and updating your website very easy.
WordPress doesn’t require you to purchase software in order to edit and update your website. Everything happens in your browser window (Chrome, Safari, Firefox etc), so as long as you have an internet connection, you can edit your website.
WordPress is a free to use CMS and powers over 27.5% of all websites on the internet! It’s constantly being updated and is easy to extend and customise. It’s also easy to add, edit and delete content from too. If you can use Microsoft Word, you’ll be able to edit a WordPress website.
So, if you’re called ‘Acme Widgets’, you should try and register a domain name starting with ‘acmewidgets’ and ending in a suffix relevant to your country or type of business.
A suffix is the ‘bit’ at the end of your website address. Well known suffixes like .com, .net and .org are very popular, but you should also consider .co.uk or .uk if you are in the United Kingdom.
There are dozens of different suffixes available now ranging from .london to .xxx!
In essence, all your website’s text, images and associated files are stored on a hosting company’s server and made accessible to internet browsers around the world.
Hosting can be in any country, but it’s usually best to host in your country of residence, for easy and quick support when required. Choosing a decent web hosting company is paramount to the success of your website.
We stopped providing general hosting services in 2012 but we can recommend two companies that we use for all our hosting requirements… they’re excellent.
Services we use & recommend
We use the software and services below in our own and most of our client websites. We recommend them because we use and believe in what they can do to improve the experience you provide your website’s visitors and even your rankings in search engines such as Google. For your information, the links are affiliate links, which means we earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase. There is no extra cost to you and we only recommend products and services we use and have had good results with.
‘Green’ Website Hosting
Why we use it…
Kualo is a website hosting company that uses 100% renewable energy. Data centres consume huge amounts of energy so Kualo’s 100% green energy policy ensures a cleaner and greener future for us all. Using renewable energy is also good for business as customers love buying from ‘green’ suppliers.
Faster Websites
Why we use it…
WP Rocket makes your WordPress website faster. This means your website will load quicker on your visitor’s computer, smartphone or tablet. Visitors read and buy more from fast websites. Google likes fast websites too, so WP Rocket can also help improve your search engine rankings!
Website Security
Why we use it…
iThemes Security Pro is a comprehensive and easy-to-use security plugin which helps keep your WordPress website secure and the bad guys out. ‘Hacked’ websites are bad for business, bad for visitor experience and can negatively affect your Google rankings if flagged. iTSP helps you stay secure.
Project Communication
Why we use it…
ProjectHuddle helps web designers, graphic designers, illustrators, photographers and other creatives, get targeted feedback from clients on projects they are working on together. It’s easy for clients to use and an efficient way for you to manage their changes and corrections. Our clients love it and it’s more affordable for us, which is a bonus!
Simple CMS – No Database!
Why we use it…
Sitecake CMS is very easy to implement into a static HTML or PHP websites and even easier for website admins (your clients) to use. WordPress is overkill for most small businesses websites and has many hidden costs. However, when a client wants to edit their site a simple CMS is essential, and this is when we use Sitecake. Try a demo here.
Best WordPress Page Builder
Why we use it…
Elementor is the best and easiest to use WordPress page builder on the market today and we know because we’ve used almost all the others! We use it for almost all our own and our client websites. We cannot recommend it highly enough, as it gives you so much flexibility and makes creating and updating a website very quick and easy.