For anyone about to build a first website. These articles cover what every small business site needs, choosing between a free subdomain and your own domain, building without code, whether to hire a developer, the pre-launch checklist, and why a brand new site does not appear in Google straight away.
Most agencies do both, and most agency websites treat one as an afterthought. The fields differ, the searches differ and the people differ. How to carry both without building two sites.
Three quotes for the same site can differ by a factor of thirty, and all three can be honest. What you are actually paying for, which costs recur, and the ones nobody puts in the quote.
Forty minutes lost comparing two designs that differ by a typeface. What a design actually decides, what it does not, and the three questions that get you to a choice in five minutes.
The site takes a minute. The decisions take the week. An honest breakdown of what happens in the first minute, the first hour, the first day and the first week, and which of it you can put off.
Most of a move is an inventory you take before you touch anything. Here is what actually transfers, what has to be rebuilt, and the sequence that keeps the old site up until the new one is proven.
The subscriptions are not the expensive part. The seams are: a customer who exists five times, in five systems, none of which can tell you what they spent. What joins up, and what genuinely should not.
Every new site starts on a free address that works perfectly well. Here is what you gain by buying your own, what it costs, and the one part of the switch worth doing carefully.
A new site is usually missing from search for one of six reasons, and only one of them is time. How to work out which, in the order that costs you the least effort.
Before you hit publish, run through this 12-point checklist so your website launches polished, professional, and problem-free.