Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

A responsive website responds to the device that accesses it and delivers the appropriate output for it. A responsive website looks great on all devices; desktop computers, tablet computers like the iPad, and mobile phones. No more pinching and zooming! Many web designers do not currently provide responsive websites – always ask before you buy!

Google recommends responsive design: Responsive web design is Google's recommended approach to website construction. See related information on their blog: Recommendations for building smartphone optimised websites

Before you buy a website, make sure that you ask ‘is it responsive?’

Yes, we can arrange a .co.uk domain name free of charge as part of a web design package (if required). Many of our clients already have access to a domain name that they wish to use for their website. Either way, we can get you up and running quickly. We pay your domain registration fee to cover the first year. After that, we charge a small annual renewal fee (free if you take up our annual hosting package).

For businesses based in the UK selling products or services to the UK market, we recommend buying the .co.uk domain and using this as your primary domain; this will give you a small advantage when it comes to search engine optimisation for UK traffic. We also suggest purchasing the .com version of the domain when available (to avoid domain squatting); we’ll use it as a secondary domain by pointing it at your .co.uk.

No, absolutely not. We provide reliable, UK based hosting completely free of charge for the first year for all web packages and ecommerce projects. Annual renewal charges are low and you can cancel at any time.

We take great pride in providing a well organised, fast turn around on all projects. Brochure websites can be completed within 5 days of receiving your final text and image content. Ecommerce websites take a little longer – up to 10 days from receiving your product details – but timescales for ecommerce projects are often dictated by the time taken to set up a payment provider and/or an internet merchant account. The timescales noted assume that the client provides timely responses to all information requests.

Absolutely nothing if you want to do it yourself! All our web design packages and ecommerce stores come with their own content management system that will let you make changes to text and images without harming the website structure, colour palette or style. Need a little help the first time? Just give us a call. Alternatively send us a joblist and we’ll get small changes done on an hourly rate and larger modifications on a quotation basis.

All our brochure website packages come with a detailed online user manual and about 30 tutorial videos - you'll be making changes in no time at all!

All projects require a 50% advance fee prior to us starting work. 25% of the total fee is then due once you've accepted the website layout and design. The final 25% is due on completion prior to the site ‘going live’.

We prefer payments to be made by bank transfer. Our business bank details are available on all payment requests. Payments are due upon receipt of the invoice or payment request. For new clients, cleared payment will be required prior to starting work. Regular payments, such as those required for hosting or search engine optimisation, require you to set up a standing order with your bank for the pre-agreed amount. An invoice will be issued for your records once the payment has cleared.

We can accept payment using credit cards, debit cards and PayPal. All such payments are processed through PayPal and incurr a 5% transaction fee (to offset the commission rates charged by PayPal).

Yes, we can provide components for a website using Adobe Flash. These components are non-standard and vary drastically in scope; they are, therefore, chargeable. Please provide a detailed specification and ask for a quote.

We tend to discourage our clients from using Flash on their websites, since Flash is not supported by Apple devices including the iPad and iPhone. We may be able to develop similar animations using CSS3 that are HTML5 compliant and supported across all modern browsers and devices.

We expect that you will want to provide your own business and product photos for use on the site. We also have access to over 19 million high quality stock photographs that we can utilise for the main site layout and to ‘flesh out’ the site if necessary.

Homepage slideshows are included in the price of our brochure and ecommerce packages.

Additional slideshows, minor CSS3 transitions and jQuery "effects" may also be included in our quoted price if their extent is specified and agreed prior to the project starting. Basic features, such as scrolling anchors and fadein / fadeout are included.

More complicated CSS3 transitions and advanced features using jQuery may be chargeable.

We can add PayPal BuyNow and Subscription buttons to any brochure website package. You would generate the buttons using your verified PayPal business account and provide the code for us to paste into your webpages.

Adding video is straight forward. We recommend that you upload your videos to a YouTube channel (we can help with the set up of a channel) and then embed the YouTube video into any webpage using the CMS media wizard.

If you wish to run video direct from your website (without using a YouTube channel), we would need to convert your video files to three web formats, update your htaccess file and integrate a video player into your website. This facility is chargeable and not included in the pricing shown for our packages. Pricing is dependent on file filesize and quantity of videos.

All brochure and ecommerce projects include the provision of a logo in vector format. That means the logo can be scaled from business card to building size without loss of resolution - ideal for any print media or advertising purposes. Logo artwork is provided upon completion of the project.

We provide a secure method of sharing your content. We ask that the text content for each page of your website is your FINAL version and is provided to us in a Microsoft Word Document with a separate document allocated to each page. Any text that requires formatting (bold, italic etc) on the website should be formatted in the Word Document. Any specific linking would also be set out in the Word document. All images would normally be provided in JPEG/JPG format and should be of sufficient quality / size for the required use. Other acceptable image formats are; PSD, PNG, AI.

When we design any new site, we will investigate the most appropriate keywords for the page content that you provide. After agreement with you, we’ll incorporate those keywords into the title tag and meta area of the pages. We'll also aim to optimise the internal anchor text of your website as we build your site. This will help the search engines understand what each page is about and provide some initial traffic for your new site. Thereafter, traffic levels can be improved by a sustained program of search engine optimisation (please ask for prices).

As soon as the site has been completed, we'll ‘ping’ a variety of online services to help get your site noticed. Inclusion in our portfolio and blog will also help Google and other search engines to find and index your website quickly. We'll also tweet about your new site and post an update on our Facebook and Google + pages.

Don’t believe anyone asking for cash to submit your website to the search engines; spend it more wisely! We’ll get you listed for free leaving more of your budget available for search engine optimisation and online marketing. Just read Google’s comment at Google Webmaster Central on adding a site to Google.

“Inclusion in Google’s search results is free and easy; you don’t even need to submit your site to Google….. In fact, the vast majority of sites listed in our results aren’t manually submitted for inclusion, but found and added automatically when our spiders crawl the web.”

Smaller sites with few webpages don't require an HTML sitemap. Google and other search engines do a great job of discovering a website's internal pages from links on the homepage. For larger websites, where some pages may be many clicks away from the homepage, we would suggest optimising the internal linking structure of the site and submitting an XML sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools.

An XML sitemap lists the pages on your website, rating each page in order of importance and noting an update frequency. An XML sitemap can be submitted to Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines to help them crawl and index your website. This is different to HTML sitemaps normally found in larger websites to help visitors locate items of interest.

If a site owner wishes to give instructions to web robots, he must place a text file called robots.txt in the root of the web site. This text file should contain instructions in a specific format to instruct search engine robots which web pages it should index and which it should ignore.

We would appreciate feedback on why you wish to move hosting. We are happy to provide ftp access for you to copy the site over to your new hosting. If you would like us to transfer the website on your behalf, and assuming that your new server meets our minimum requirements, we can do this on an hourly rate basis payable in advance.