Website Design FAQs give you a bit of help in understanding the design process, PLEASE get in touch if you have anymore questions!
- We recommend NetNerd* Essential hosting package. This costs £29.99 (+VAT) per year. Their support is UK based and is fantastic. They offer daily backups as well as a free security certificate. It includes a free domain and 20 emails.
- Domains start at £1 for a .co.uk for the first year.
- Or if you already have your web space and/or domain, we are happy to work with that.
- We ask for a deposit of roughly a third of the overall quoted fee. This books in your project. Then a third midway and the final payment within 7 days of completion.
- We generally charge per hour and will give you a full breakdown of everything we do. We have done enough websites to give you a good idea of how much the finished website will cost.
- We like to develop websites using an open source technology called WordPress. We are familiar with this, which makes the design process quicker. We have our own free templates but you could choose your own from a third party company such as Studio press or ThemeForest. There are literally thousands to choose from!
- WordPress is easy for the user to update, thus saving you time (and money)
- We have also worked with Shopify, SquareSpace and Wix. As WordPress is a free service, there are no ongoing costs, we will try to suggest the best technology for your business.
- IMAGES! Processing images takes a lot of time (and time is money!) You can help the web design process by:
- When you first come to us it is a good idea to have a few examples of websites you like and any features you would like to incorporate. You can browse our recent websites for inspiration. We do like to keep things as simple as possible as this helps the reader (and search engines) navigate your site.
For a small extra fee we can check your site monthly for any updates that may be needed, this will keep your site up to date with any security patches needed and ensure all the different elements are still working together correctly.
Each month we can also check for any SEO updates that your site may need and any further tweaks that could be made to help Google and the other search engines see you.
- Search Engine Optimization…..any the wiser?……..It is basically trying to make your website easy for search engines (Google, Bing etc) to find and easy for the reader to navigate.
- Search engine optimization is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site’s user experience and performance in organic search results.
- Google needs to know you exist! So if you have a new website we can help you register with Google. This is a free service, where Google will send you a postcard to check you are a genuine business.
- It can take some time and some careful techniques to begin to show up in a Google search…we can help you with this process.
- Google has become more sophisticated in recent years you can no longer buy your way to being top of the list, some careful strategies need to be followed. Google basically is striving to make the internet a useful place. Google search works in essentially three stages:
- Crawling: Google searches the web with automated programs called crawlers, looking for pages that are new or updated. Google stores those page addresses (or page URLs) in a big list to look at later.
- Indexing: Google visits the pages that it has learned about by crawling, and tries to analyse what each page is about. Google analyses the content, images, and video files in the page, trying to understand what the page is about.
- Serving search results: When a user performs a Google search, Google tries to determine the highest quality results. The “best” results have many factors, including things such as the user’s location, language, device (desktop or phone), and previous queries.
- With this in mind, your website needs to be well written, contain key phrases and be easy for the crawlers to access. As we said above, well labelled images help, as well as a summary of each page (known as Meta Description)…….we can explain more later. We use a great paid plugin called SEOPress which helps with this process.
- It takes time, for Google to see you which is why we recommend a maintenance package with us so that we can continually check your website is being the best it can be!
Get in touch to see how we can help you:
* Affiliate Disclaimer
We may receive a very small reward from NetNerd if you choose to use them (not received anything yet!) We receive nothing from any other company we have mentioned here.
