So you want a small business website, but you’re not sure what’s involved with all these monthly payments, you can’t figure out why there aren’t any set-up costs (what’s the catch?!) and you’d like to know exactly what we’re hiding from you when we say there aren’t any contracts (there aren’t, we promise).

Oh and SEO? Are you people just trying to blind us science, or does it actually mean something?

Well friends, read on and we’ll enlighten you...

Contracts (or lack of...)

Do I own my website?

How do monthly payments work?

Are there upfront fees?

What about website back-ups?

Where is my website held?

Will you SEO my website?

Do you submit my website to major search engines?

Do you set up Google analytics?

There’s no contract. Really?

That’s right, we simply don’t believe in asking our customers to sign contracts. We’d rather keep you by delivering on our promise and building great looking, effective websites. So all we ask is that you give us 30 days’ notice before leaving us – partly as a courtesy and also to give us time to say goodbye.

But if you want to take your website...

There is a leaving fee. That is, if you’re leaving us and you want to take your website with you, we will need to charge you for it. This is to cover the cost of building your website, which we normally recoup through your monthly payments. As you’d expect, this cost reduces over time, so it gets less and less for every year that you’re with us.

For an exact breakdown of leaving fees, please download our document.

Do I own my website?

Strictly speaking you don’t own your website. Because we don’t charge an upfront fee, you are effectively renting your website from us on an ongoing basis. You only own your website if you decide to leave us and take your website with you.

Of course if you’d prefer to pay an upfront fee and own your website at the outset, then we’re open to discussing this too.

Do my monthly payments reduce after a set period of time?

In a word: no. Your rental fee covers the design and build of your website - plus any extras like content writing or logo design – but it also includes web hosting and support and any site updates you might need. For that reason we need to keep your monthly payments at a constant rate throughout your time with us.

Look at it another way. There’s no inflation! We won’t increase your payments at any point, unless you decide to upgrade your package, for example if you opt for Ecommerce.

So there’s absolutely no upfront fee?

That’s right, we don’t charge any lump sum payments for your website. All we ask is that you pay us a month’s rental when we start building your website, the cost of which depends on your package.

It’s our way of asking you to show us a little faith, so we know we have some commitment from you.

Is my website backed up?

Oh yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Your website is backed up every night and copied across to Amazon S3’s servers in Dublin. This way we can be doubly sure that we always have a recent copy of your website – updates included – should anything go wrong.

Where do you hold my website?

Your website is held with the web hosting provider, 1 and 1, on their servers in Germany. This means that it’s covered by EU data protection laws. 1 and 1 are an internationally renowned company and you can find out more about them here.

Will you SEO my website?

We always build basic SEO into new websites. We do this by researching the right keywords for your product or service and then weaving them into the site content – both in ways you can see and ways that you can’t.

Ways you can see – If you look closely at your content you should see certain key words or phrases popping up again and again. You may also notice them in page titles. The best example of this is the website www.photographeroxfordshire.co.uk which has the key phrase ‘photographer oxfordshire’ embedded in content throughout the site. You can also see that phrase in the footer of the website i.e. the area right at the bottom of the website, that has copyright information in it.

Ways you can’t – Behind the scenes we create things called meta descriptions and meta tags, that allow us to build keywords into your site, but in a way that’s hidden from view.  All of this is visible to Google and is used by Google to assess where it ranks your website.

You will only see a meta description when you’re searching for something and a web link appears. The blurb that goes with it is the meta description.

Of course some websites are easier to get ranked than others, which largely depends on how competitive the search term is. For this reason your website may not perform well simply from our initial SEO work. So we offer ongoing SEO packages to help you with your web rankings, if you need it.

We always advise customers to give their website at least 3 months before starting on an SEO package. This way you can see how well your site ranks from the basic SEO and if you actually need that extra push. It could save you some pennies!

Will you submit my site to the major search engines?

Shortly before your site goes live, we submit a site map to Google to help it get listed as quickly as possible. It usually takes a week or two for Google to list your website, so that it’s searchable on Google, and it can take even longer for it to get found for relevant search terms. So please don’t panic if you can’t find your website in the search engines immediately after ‘go live’.

If you still can’t see it after 2 weeks then just ask us and we’ll look into it for you.

Do you set up Google analytics?

We set up Google analytics for your website when it goes live and we use analytics to monitor your web performance on an ongoing basis. If you’d like to see analytics data yourself, then please ask us and we’ll set up an automated report, either weekly or monthly, that will send stats straight to your inbox. No middleman required...