Web Design FAQs

• Traditional outbound marketing strategies (broadcast ads, print ads, cold emails and telesales) waste time and money on messaging people who aren’t interested and often resent being pitched. Paid online ads are more targeted, but can still be costly and addictive. Visitors can easily cost over £1 but under 1% then typically become customers. If your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) exceeds your sales profit, you’re just wasting money. Yet even then,m stopping can be hard, as that loses the traffic you’ve been buying. Getting these numbers wrong can easily kill a small business, but they just don’t work for everyone.
• Inbound marketing aims to attract attention from a targeted, interested audience of potential customers and to earn their trust before pitching. So my affordable marketing site package is designed to help you earn free visitors from Google through strong on-site SEO. I can then help you augment that through content marketing (blogging), off-site SEO, social media marketing, newsletters and mailing lists, review management and video marketing, We can also then work on Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO), which boosts the percentage of visitors who become customers. Basic sites just don’t include the tools to do this very effectively.

Yes. We all have our own experience and skill sets. Helping small business owners like you is mine. Asking questions is better than learning stuff by trial and error, so never feel awkward about it.

Step by step:

1. Get started. Book a call, or pick a plan (see the “How much does website design cost?” item below for links to more info). Distractions will keep appearing until you commit.
2. Relax and let me walk you through it. Building effective business websites takes weeks or months, not in a few hectic hours or days. So we’ll work around your other commitments as far as possible. If events beyond your control have set urgent deadlines, definitely book a call first, though. Otherwise, you’ve got time, and I can help you find it.

Not really. I can help with those — otherwise it’s easy to make common mistakes. Just book a call, and we can discuss what you’ll need to get from where you are to where you want to be, and how to get those things sorted.

Success takes more than strong visuals and catchy copywriting — and many factors are far less visible. It’s not as simple as building a site you like and filling it with content you want to see. For instance, here are some of the things I help clients with:

• Branding: logo, typography, colours, brand “voice” & values
• Domains, hosting and DNS management
• Server and software maintenance
• Security — including SSL certificates
• Legal Compliance
• Site speed & “web vitals”
• Crawlability: sitemaps & code quality
• Mobile friendly, responsive web design
• Performance management: stats, analysis & experiments
• Interactivity & Engagement: forms, chat, animation etc.
• Audience targeting & user-centric design
• Content quality: relevance, readability, structure, usefulness, interest, expertise, authority
• On-site SEO (including structured data)
• Email marketing: newsletters, outreach, deliverability
• Social Proof: reviews, video testimonials, client logos, accreditations
• Off-site SEO (backlinks, directory citations etc.)
• Content updates
• Video marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Process automation
• Accessibility
• Interest Targeting & Keyword Research
• Target Audience Personas (UX/UI)
• Conversion Rate Optimisation & A/B Testing
• Google Business Profile
• Bing for Business
• Paid Ads and remarketing strategies
• Lead magnets and sales funnel design

Even web designers confuse these — but then, many confuse art and design, too. Sometimes that doesn’t matter much, but when it does:

• Art makes things pretty. Design makes things work.
• Web development uses programming and/or scripting languages to implement complex behaviours and processes. Web design code in markup languages that control layouts on various devices, but those can’t automate complex decision-making.

However, modern websites are often built from pre-developed components that mostly need configuration and visual styling to achieve common business goals. Putting those together is more design than development, but can be called either. Still, full web development is far more complex and time-consuming, so is rarely realistic on budgets under £10k.

Put simply, if you have goals to achieve, you need design, not art. If those goals involve implementing specific, uncommon processes, you’ll probably need a web developer, not just a web designer.

The two disciplines are so dissimilar that most visual designers can’t program, and most programmers can’t do visual design. I’ve been doing both for decades, and my goal is to help small firms find solutions that fit their budget. So whatever you need, we should talk.

The cost of website design varies widely, based on:

• The size and complexity of the project. More pages, features, bespoke work or decision-makers all add to this.
• How much help you need. If you’re a startup, there’s lots to learn — and I’ve specialised in helping folks do that cost-effectively since 2005.

So we’d normally need a scheduled call or video meeting to discuss those details, free from distractions. That said, over the years, I’ve developed a few flexible packages that cover most common startup requirements:

• Affordable sites — highly cost-effective, editable sites with setup payments split over several months to help your cash flow. Covering anything from simple templated brochures to bespoke e-commerce, the base packages range from £1200 to £1800 in £300 increments. They also offer 100% green, high-performance, secure UK hosting, security updates, ongoing support, email and more from £75/month. Some clients qualify for discounts on these prices, whilst others choose to add extra features to them, so these packages work out as the most flexible, growth-focused options around for small firms.
• Budget sites — built on proprietary systems, these aren’t as flexible, user-friendly or search-optimised as my affordable sites but can support blogging from just £900 plus £60/month (or £95/month for e-commerce). So if your site isn’t business-critical but you still want basic marketing features on a low budget, these sites can help.
• Basic “Static” sites — simple brochure sites with no built-in editing system (aka “static”). These can’t support advanced marketing strategies like blogging. Still, if you’re on a very tight budget, just want to present a few pages of info with a contact form, and don’t want to do site edits yourself, starting from £600 plus £60/month these may work for you. Simple editing and small webshop systems (for up to 100 products) can be added cost-effectively, although not with the flexibility of my more advanced website packages.
• One page sites — a single, non-editable page that can present a few sections of info and a contact form, from just £60/month. Such small sites don’t attract much search traffic. So they need to be supported by some other traffic source, such as paid ads and/or offline marketing like networking or vehicle livery.

More complex bespoke projects, like large website redesigns, need to be individually assessed and start at £3000. Finally, bespoke web development (programming processes specific to your business), starts at £10,000.

Timescales for building websites vary depending on the project’s complexity and scope, and how quickly you can provide feedback when required. If all the content is available up-front, and you aren’t busy, a very simple business site could be built in a fortnight or less. That’s assuming you want it done well enough to compete. However, because most small business owners are busy, most projects take two months or more.

Web development projects tend to take far longer. So they are often best planned in multiple ongoing stages of development. For that, we prioritise your requirements and start with a Minimum Viable Product (“MVP”). Then we continually refine features and add the less-essential ones, step by step. That way, something goes live as soon as possible, but you don’t have to fret about it being feature-complete and perfect from the outset. Few projects are, anyway — a smart business is always open to feedback and change requests from its customers, which can be quite eye-opening.

Usually within a week. However, the complexity of web projects means I can only take on a few at a time. Sometimes, I have to stop taking on new projects for a few weeks or even months. So please book a callback to check my current availablity.

Absolutely! In today’s digital landscape, having a mobile-friendly website is crucial. So all the sites I build are “responsive”, adapting to different screen sizes to optimise user experience across desktops, tablets, and mobile devices.

Yes, I can offer custom copywriting, blogging, infographics, videos and e-book creation (e.g. for lead magnets), as well as stock media to cover a wide range of needs and general content planning help. I can also provide basic compliance content for your Cookie and Site Privacy Policy pages.

Certainly — if you want to! I normally base sites on user-friendly content management systems (CMS) to let you make changes and additions to your website’s content easily. If you don’t think you’ll have time for that though, let me know and we’ll discuss other options.

Yes — and no. It’s here, but I don’t keep it up to date as testimonials are far more important in web design. You’re not a carbon-copy of any of my previous clients, so your site will have different images, content and branding. What will stay the same — I hope — is that you’ll be as happy to work with me as the previous clients who provided those reviews.