Website Design FAQs

Professional website design is an investment in your business and costs will reflect the complexity you need to be built into the website to deliver your goals.

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.

It depends on what you require from your website and if we have to launch to meet a specific deadline such as a product launch or trade show. Sometimes it’s possible to launch early with the basics in place and trickle feed extra pages, posts and products when time and budget allows.

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.

Yes and we will also incorporate over 30 short help videos into your website design’s admin area as part of our ‘Essential Plugins’ package.

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.

No, we provide estimates for all website design and development projects.

This way you know what you’re spending and what you’ll get for your money.

Experience, skills, processes and customer support are good places to start.

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.

The first stage of our design and development process is to request a brief for the project being proposed.

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.

We build most client websites using the WordPress CMS. We do use other systems though if the project doesn’t require the power that WordPress provides.

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.

Basically, a domain name is the name of your 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!

Hosting is a term used to describe where your website is stored and accessible on the world wide web.

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.