Website Questions and Answers

I need a website, how much will it cost?

£300 (or £240 if you’re local) is usually what I charge for a new website.

Website design prices cane vary. If you’re looking for me to do something like set you up so you can make your own website that would be cheaper, but if you want something more bespoke or specialised such as an online shop that’s more expensive.

Is the £300 for JUST the website design?

The £300 covers the website, the search engine optimisation (SEO), performance optimisation (for fast page load times), and indexing with major search engines (Google and Bing).

It’s not just “here’s your website” it’s “here’s your website, it’s super fast, it’s on page one of Google”.

So I give you £300 and you give me a website?

Well, you could look at it like that.

Usually I’ll start by asking you a few questions about you or your business, what search terms you’d like to be found for, and how much input or control you’d like over the content.

I then go and start the website design. Once I’m done with that I show it to you, and you ask me to change stuff. We do the “show it to you, you ask me to change that” 3 times, or until you’re happy with it. I then do the performance tuning, the search engine optimisation (SEO), the sitemap, the robots.txt, then request indexing with bing and Google.

You pay me.

Sometime in the next 2-6 weeks, your site is on page one of Google.

Why does it take 2-6 weeks to get to page one of Google?

Google have a time factor built in to their algorithm. They’ll also crawl your site a few times to see if content changes to gain a level of “trust”.

The effect of both of these is that it there’s a bit of time between your site going live and it ranking in search engine results.

Page one of Google? I don’t believe you!

Don’t worry, I’d be sceptical if someone said that to me.

There are exceptions to the “page one of google” thing. If you want to appeal to a national audience getting to page one is difficult. If you have a lot of local competition (an igloo builder in Greenland for example) it can be harder too.

If you’re a sole trader or a small business appealing to a local audience, page one is a lot more achievable.

I have a proven track record of getting websites to the page one of Google, for specific search terms. Put “landscape gardening Bournemouth” in to google (minus the quotes), see Matthew’s website… look at the footer.

Your pricing is very cheap compared to other website design agencies. How?

Good question. I’m glad you asked that.

If I ONLY provided website design and charged £300, I’d have to make about 8 websites a month (two a week) to be able to afford the mortgage. I’d also have to find 8 new customers every month. In reality neither are going to happen.

Website design isn’t my day job. I work for a web hosting provider as a systems administrator as my main job. The website design I do in addition to my day job. It’s this that allows me to offer such low cost website design services.

It was my boss who suggested I started offering website design services for people when Liz Truss tanked the economy. The deal is that I make people websites and they host using the company I work for as my day job.

You might think there’s a conflict of interests in there somewhere, but it’s actually the other way round!

For example, the hosting company I work for charges £6 per month for a mid range hosting package. A design agency will often charge somewhere in the region of £50 per month for hosting.

The other advantage is that I know the hosting we provide at work will suit your website, that your site will pass core web vitals, and that all the other “things you might need” are built in by default, with no extra costs. I’m talking backups, certificates, website management tools, PHP version selectors, that kind of thing. You’d be surprised how much some people charge for these facilities that we build in for free.

Will I be able to get hold of you on the phone?

Yes, you will. Even though I’m at work, I’m effectively onboarding a new customer to the company I work for. My boss knows this, so he’s all good with me taking your calls.

Can I get it for cheaper?

You could do something like buy hosting and a domain (between £45 and £60 up front for a year… cheaper if you pay monthly), then have me install, configure and secure a content management system (like WordPress).

I’d do that for £100 (that’s in addition to the “between £45 and £60” mentioned above).

This would give you everything you need to make a website, but please bear in mind that I can’t train or teach you, and if you want me to do things to the site that you’ve made I do charge for search engine optimisation (SEO) and performance optimisation as standalone services.

How do I get started with your website design services?

You get in touch, and we have a quick chat about what you want in a website. We go from there.

I can usually give you a price in the first conversation (this does tend to be £300 or £240 with a local discount) unless you want something like a shop, they’re more expensive.

Once I’ve got an idea of content and search terms you’d like your site found for in Google, I can get going. You can have as much or as little oversight or input as you like.

I’ve have made websites for people who have said “pictures on facebook, I want to be found for x, y and z”. 3 weeks later, they’ve got a website they love on page one of Google.

I’ve also made websites for people who’ve given me a word document of what they want their website to look like and an “I want it to look exactly like that and I want to be found for….” 3 weeks later, they’ve got a website they love on page one of Google.

What areas do you cover?

Anywhere with an internet connection.

I’m kind of joking. I live in East Cornwall, near Liskeard, and I service the surrounding area primarily (especially if you’d like me to visit your office), which includes Bodmin, Saltash, Looe, Polperro, Fowey, Callington, Saltash, Plymouth St Austell and everywhere in between.

I’ve got clients as far away as York , Swansea, Bournemouth and Devon, and I’m happy to work with anyone in the UK if they’re fine with a remote developer.

The local discount I offer is for most of South East Cornwall, partly because I couldn’t find an electrician on Google, and party because it would be a bit rude not to want to help out businesses in the local area.

How long does it take?

At the shortest 1 week, at the most something like 3 weeks. It can take longer if you request lots of changes, but there’s not often the need for you to do so.

How it works questions:

What’s a domain?

When it comes to website design, everything starts with the domain.

A domain is your own unique website address. The part after the www. in a browser’s address bar is a domain. The part of an email address after the @ sign is a domain.

There’s more to this than a domain, though. It’s effectively the ‘top of the tree’ as far as your site and online presence is concerned. I’ll be able to help you choose a domain that’s good for you and your business, unless you already know what you want. You can find more information about this on this page on my blog.

What’s hosting?

Hosting is the webspace in which a website exists. Your domain (mentioned above) is mapped to your hosting.

A hosting account is your part of a bigger computer that’s available on the internet.

The “bigger computer” provides a set of services that your site needs to run, such as a web server, a database server, DNS services and so on. All these services are a bit like the plumbing that your website needs to be available on the internet.

What is search engine optimisation (SEO)?

A website is more than just what a human sees. Search engines like Google and Bing see your site more as a collection of text and images sorted in to different areas. You, as a website visitor, don’t see some of what Google and Bing see.

Search engines aim to provide the most relevant and informative website for the search term that’s used, at the top of result pages. The second most relevant is the second nearest the top and so on. Search engines have to work out how relevant and informative your website is.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is really about using the part of the website you see, the part of the website you don’t see, and the “most relevant and informative” factor to make your website appear as near the top of page one of search engine results as possible.

The Duloe Community Shop website I helped set up is on page one of Google for search terms such as “Duloe shop” and “shop in Duloe”. There’s only one shop in Duloe, though, so being the most relevant for these search terms wasn’t too tricky.

On the other hand, making a website for a landscape gardener in Bournemouth was more of a challenge, because there are quite a lot of landscape gardeners in Bournemouth… 10 pages of them according to Google search results

The more competition there is to be the most relevant, the harder search engine optimisation (SEO) becomes.

There’s no one size fits all answer or method for SEO, it varies between websites and businesses.

What is performance optimisation.

Performance optimisation is all about improving user experience.

A website needs to be fast to load pages, it needs to be laid out logically, you can’t have page elements moving around on the page as the page loads.

A website also needs to pass Core Web Vitals (these are Google’s performance measurements) to be able to rank well in search engine results. Due to this there’s a relationship between performance and search engine optimisation (SEO). This is why I carry out both performance optimisation and search engine optimisation (SEO) for all the websites that I create.

Practical website design questions:

Why don’t you charge as much as other people for website design?

I think that having a website should be an affordable option for any business, big or small. Having a website designed and created shouldn’t be a financial obstacle for any business.

Charging someone a lot for a website that’s overly complicated just to fulfil a financial requirement doesn’t sit well with me. I’d much rather provide a site that suits the needs of the business (and that ranks well), rather than the needs of the website creator.

They key objectives to website design are getting your business found online, and presenting a quality site to your potential customers. It’s all about achieving these objectives in a way that both suits you, and that suits your finances.

Can you design my whole website for me, or do I need to do anything?

I can. That’s right, I can make all the content, and get it online if you just want “I give you money I get a website without lifting a finger” type affair. All I’d need to be able to do this are your contact details and some idea what your company offers.

If you’d like me to do the whole of the website design, but you’d like to be able to provide text and images and maybe more, I can work like this too. This is my preferred option when it comes to website design, as between us, you’ll get the site that you had in mind, and I’ll get it online to conform to the requirements of search engines, to allow you or your business to be found easily online.

I’d usually suggest using photos that are unique to your business, such as yourself, maybe your offices, or your work vehicle(s). Photos of the products you provide or work that you’ve carried out in the past (if you provide a service) will also give visitors a clear idea of what your business provides. Visitors will also appreciate text that sounds more personal, and ‘by the business’ rather than generic marketing blurb.

That said, you don’t have to provide me with any images or text. You can just tell me what search terms you’d like to be found for, and provide me with your contact details and I’d be able to make you a website using this information alone. I know this sound a bit “out there” but it’s totally possible.

I’ll always be happy to provide you with what you want, and if you have any idea of text I’ll help you refine what you want to say (if you’d like me to), and I will edit your images for you, should you provide me with any.

As well as offering website design in full, I can also only do just the set up part for you, if you’re looking to make a website yourself but don’t know how to get started. I can also (if you want) cover all the “search engine friendly” work once you’ve made the site itself, if you’d prefer to operate in this way but aren’t familiar with this side of website design.

I’m very flexible in what I can offer to help you get your business found online.

Can you do just SOME of the website design for me?

I can indeed.

If you want to focus on creating content but need someone to do the initial set up, or maybe just ongoing maintenance that covers updates and security, I can do either or both for you.

I’m quite flexible with what I offer, and aim to provide you with a website that suits you.

I can do just the parts that you don’t want to or know how to if you like the idea of making your own website. All you’d need to do is give me an idea of what you’d like to be able to do, or how much you’d like to do, and I can get things set up accordingly. I can also make a site you’ve created SEO friendly to gain improved ranking in search engine results.

You can get the site you want, and make as much or as little of it as you want, and then I can do all the other things that need doing to make sure that your website can be easily found online.

How long will it take for you to design and create a website?

This completely depends on what type of site you’d like, but roughly speaking, at the most we’re usually looking at:

Online Business Card – Usually less than a week. If you provide a couple of pictures and some idea of the text you’d like on your site it could even be as little as a couple of days.
Straight Forward Site – Usually somewhere between a week to two weeks. Again, providing content cuts down the time if takes to make a site.
Enhanced Site – These are usually more complicated to set up, so take longer. There’s also more variation in the functionality of this type of site, so timescales can also vary. In most cases, somewhere between two to four weeks.

When you tell me about the type of site you’d like, the more concise you are the less time it takes to make. If I have to revise a site multiple times to get it to something you like, this will take longer. If this kind of things takes a really long time, I might have to charge more, simply to cover the time I put in to your site.

I don’t work slowly. I have made sites with over 50 pages in a weekend in the past. I’m also not going to eek out a project for any reason.

That didn’t take long, can I pay less?

Hmmm, tricky one. I tend to steer clear of operating in this manner, simply to make things fair. Imagine two electricians comparing websites that I made them, and one says “I got mine for £200” and the other thinks “I got charged £300 for mine”, that’s not going to go down well is it?

There is also the fact that it might have looked like it didn’t take me long, but I might have not slept for the last two nights.

I try to keep pricing as low and as static I can, and based on the end result, and I’m not a fan of overcharging people.

Why would I pay you when I can make my own with some ‘easy website builder’ type service?

You can do that if you like and if you’re that way inclined, and I think “good for you” about people taking for this approach.

My blog covers a lot of how you can make a website yourself using WordPress and a cPanel hosting platform hosting account. This isn’t for everyone, though, and there’s also an awful lot that you’ll need to do, but didn’t expect that you’d have to.

That’s where I come in. I’m here to help cover all the parts you don’t know how (or want to work out how) to do, or to do the whole thing. I’m also here to help people that have given this kind of thing a go, got a site up and running, then found that there’s a whole load of other stuff they need to do, but can’t.

Even when you’re using an “easy website design” type company, there are things that you’ll find out as you start developing a site, some of which might not be too much fun, and the costs can start to add up over time (you can see what I’m taking about on this page of my blog). An example of this would be that you make a site this way, then want your own website address. In addition to making the site you’d have to:

Buy a domain
Upgrade your ‘easy website builder’ account to a monthly chargeable account to be able to use the domain you’ve bought for the address of your site
Point your domain to ‘easy website builder’ company using DNS records

And that’s just one of the pitfalls. What you get with me is both experience, and an idea of what can be used to provide you with a site you need that can be run in the way you want. Yes, you can actually talk to me, rather than reading help articles.

None of your website design packages mention what I want my site to do, why?

Things can get very variable with regard to what people want when it somes to website design.

The website design packages that I offer are quite standardised so might not specifically mention exactly what you would like your website to do or display.

If there’s some specific functionality or feature that you’d like on a site that isn’t mentioned in my website design packages, the chances are that I’ll be able to provide you with what you’re looking for, even though it’s not explicitly mentioned. Please feel free to ask.

I don’t say I’ll make you a website that I can’t, or that I won’t do well.

I may well be able to provide you with the website that you want, but we’d probably have to have a conversation about it, to work out what that is and how much it will cost. If you don’t ask, you don’t get!

Do you do emails as well?

I do indeed. Although I’ve really just talked about websites and how much they cost I can also provide you with mailboxes. It’s possible that these will have an additional cost (although not a huge amount) depending on how they’re operated.

Do you do website hosting as well?

Yes, I do. I work for a hosting provider, so arranging some hosting for your site isn’t a big ask for me.

A website has to be hosted somewhere, and this somewhere does cost to run, so there are costs when it comes to me hosting a site for you if it’s one of the enhanced sites that I offer. This is due to this type of site needing a greater amount of resources (kind of like it running on a more powerful computer).

The hosting that I provide is reasonably priced, and includes some facilities that improve the peformance of the site itself, such as object caching and the Litespeed web server.

Whether you’ll need a hosting service is really dictated by the type of website you’d like. I can help you work out what you’ll need to be able to run the website that you want, in the way that you want to.

I’ve already got a website, can you…?

Probably, yes. It depends a bit what you want doing, but generally speaking I can help you sort most things out. I also offer services that include (but aren’t limited to) the following for people that already have websites:

SEO optimisation (get found in search engines easily).
Performance optimisation (decreasing page load times, adhering to things like Google’s page speed audits – if you run your site through https://pagespeed.web.dev and fail any audits, I can address this for you).
Website redesign and overhaul services if your site is looking or feeling a bit old and tired.
Integration services (this might be something along the lines of making booking calendars available on websites).
Website maintenance packages (ongoing patching, updates and security maintenance)
Website repair services for people who have websites that are broken or aren’t working as the should.
Provide advice (in a lot of cases I’ll give this for free, I can be reached using the contact form on this page).

I’ve got more website questions, how can I ask them?

You can use the contact form on the contact page of this site to ask me a question. I’ll add it to this FAQ if it’s a common enough query.