The things people actually ask.

Questions and answers

Do I actually own my website?

You own your domain name, all your content, your photos and your text, always. The design and code stay ours and are licensed to you for as long as you subscribe, the same way you do not own the building when you rent a shop. If you leave, we give you a full export of your content at no charge, and your domain goes with you.

What is a domain name, and do I need one?

It is your address on the internet, the yourbusiness.co.uk bit people type in. Yes, you need one, and you buy it yourself in your own name for about £12 a year. We tell you exactly what to buy and set the whole thing up for you at no charge. We deliberately do not buy it for you, because a web company that owns your domain can hold your business hostage, and we would rather you held the keys.

What if I do not like the design?

You have paid nothing at that point, so nothing is at stake. We design and build first, you see the real site rather than a sketch, and you only start paying once you have approved it. If we cannot get it right for you, you walk away owing nothing and we have done the work for free. That is our risk to carry, not yours.

What if I want to leave later?

For the first 30 days after launch, tell us and we refund every payment, no notice and no questions. After that there is a twelve-month term, and once that has finished you can cancel any time with one month notice. Whenever you go, your domain and your content go with you.

What do you need from me to get started?

A conversation. That is genuinely it. You do not need a logo, photographs, written pages, a plan, or any technical words. If you have those things we will happily use them. If you do not, writing and designing them is the job you are paying us for.

How long does it take?

Usually two to four weeks from the first call to going live, and most of that is waiting on decisions rather than on us. If you need it faster for an opening or a busy season, say so and we will tell you honestly whether it can be done.

Will I have to update it myself?

No, and there is nothing for you to log into. When you want something changed, you email, text or ring us and describe it in normal words. It is live within two working days, and up to two hours of changes a month are already in your fee.

Do I need to understand any of this?

No. That is the entire point of the service. You will never be sent a technical email, asked to click an update button, or told your software is out of date. If we ever explain something to you in jargon, we have got our job wrong.

Why a monthly fee instead of paying once?

Because a website is not a thing you buy, it is a thing that has to be hosted, secured, monitored and kept working every day after it launches. Paying once for a website is how people end up with a site that quietly rots for three years. The monthly fee means it never becomes an out-of-date asset nobody is looking after.

Is £39 a month really the whole cost?

From us, yes. There is no setup fee, no charge for hosting, no security bill, no maintenance plan on top, and no per-change fee within your included two hours a month. The only money you spend elsewhere is the roughly £12 a year for your own domain name, paid direct to the registrar. Anything genuinely outside the plan, like a full redesign or a new custom feature, is quoted and agreed in writing before a minute of work starts.

Where is my data kept?

In the United Kingdom. Enquiries and any customer records belonging to a Managed Web App live on servers we run ourselves in the UK, encrypted, and we do not copy them into marketing tools or sell them to anybody. Plenty of the big website builders store your customers data in the United States. If that matters to you, or to the people on your list, it is worth asking whoever you are comparing us against.

You are new. What happens to my site if you stop trading?

A fair question, and one we would rather answer than dodge. Your domain is registered to you, so nobody can take it. Your site is built as plain, standard web pages with no unusual software behind them, which means any competent developer can host it anywhere, and we will hand over a complete copy on request at any time. You would be inconvenienced. You would not be stuck, and you would not lose anything.

Do you build online shops?

No, and we would rather tell you that now than take the work and do it badly. If you need to sell products online with a basket and card payments, you will be better served by a platform built for it. Shopify is the usual answer, and Squarespace is worth a look for a small range. We are happy to point you in the right direction on the phone even though there is nothing in it for us. Taking bookings and payments for services, as opposed to shipping products, is a different thing and we do build that.

Can you build something more complicated than a website?

Yes, and that is the Managed Web App plan. Online booking that drops into your diary, customer logins, records of jobs and appointments, dashboards, quotes. The salon on our examples page has a working booking system you can try yourself. It builds onto the same fast site, so there is no rebuild when you are ready to grow.