You need a new website, or a refresh of your old site, but you don’t want to have to worry about the technicalities of it all. And money is tight, so you want to invest it in your organisation. We offer an affordable web design and development service, which we will tailor to meet your unique needs. We will listen to your values, and how you want to communicate. We will support you through the process, and we can even help you write the content.
Hassle-free design & development package
We will take you through the whole process from your initial enquiry, through understanding your requirements, to designing and developing your website and releasing it to the world. Our hassle-free package includes the following:
- Setting up the domain name and website hosting
- Designing the style and structure of your new website
- Building your new website
- Registering your website with search engines
- Step-by-step guide to managing your website
- Three months of support and maintenance after go-live
Bespoke design & development
We can provide the following design & development services according to your needs. See also our consultancy, integration, training, and support & maintenance services. If you have a requirement that isn’t listed here, please do still ask.
We will support you in registering your domain name and setting up your website hosting with a well-established and reliable company. Or we can develop a website on a domain and hosting you already own. The hosting must have some minimum requirements, and we will need administration access.
We will have an initial discussion about your organisation and what you want from your website. See our “Guide – A website brief in 8.5 chapters” for questions and advice to prompt your thinking.
We will design the style and structure of your website. A visitor to your website will make an instant decision whether to explore it further or to leave, based on the design. Usually you will want them to take some action. So your website needs to look good, to guide visitors through your key content, and to enable them to find answers to their questions quickly and easily.
We can design a new website from scratch, or refresh the design of an existing website.
As we build the website, we will provide you with a passworded access, so you can view, test and comment. Once you have approved the new website, we will set it to go live.
We can also write copy for your website, based on raw material that you provide, and guidance on your preferred writing style and number and length of pages. Good copy will engage your visitors, and help your website appear higher in search engine results.
We can also recommend a photographer if you would like professionally-produced images on your website.
It’s no good having a shiny new website if it can’t be found. We will provide advice on copy and design the website structure and content to attract a high search engine ranking. We will submit your website for indexing by search engines such as Google and Bing. We can also set up search engine optimisation, with keywords and descriptions of all content on your website for search engines to use in indexing.
Frequently asked questions
How long will it take?
It very much depends on you! It will take longer if you need support in clarifying your ideas of what you want to achieve. Provision of content is often a bottleneck, so in a project to develop a new site, it is helpful if most of the website text and imagery is provided in advance of the design stage.
Having said that, it can be very speedy, and we will endeavour to fit you in if you need a quick turnaround. We recently developed a website within 24 days from initial inquiry to go live.
How much will it cost?
Again, it very much depends on your requirements!
We can work with you to refine your requirements to fit within your budget. As an indication, the hassle-free design & development package for a simple website with about five pages of content would cost £500-750.
Note that you also need to factor in the set-up and ongoing costs of the domain and hosting, and costs of any stock images or specialised bits of functionality.
What do we need to provide?
In order for us to estimate costs, you will first need to provide an outline of your requirements. We can help you develop these. They will include content – ie rough number of pages – and functionality – eg whether you want a blog, events calendar, social media integration, shop, discussion forum, and so on.
For the design stage, you will need to tell us how you want to present your organisation – the look and feel of the website. For example, you might be after a clear and professional look, or maybe a friendly and vibrant look. You don’t need to worry if you are not sure about colour scheme or layout, as we can help you formulate design ideas. It’s always helpful to look at the websites of similar organisations, or any websites, and see what you like and what works, and what you don’t like and what doesn’t work.
Also for the design stage, we will need your logo or any photos and other images to be incorporated in the design.
For the development stage, we will need you to provide copy, any other images, audio, video, documents for download, and any other content. We provide guidance on file formats and delivery. It’s helpful to provide as much of this as possible before the design stage, as it can be a bottleneck. Note that we do provide a copy-writing service, in which case we will need you to provide the raw material.
We will also need you to tell us what domain name and email addresses you would like us to set up. If you already have a domain and hosting, or we are refreshing an existing website, we will need admin access. We will need to know names and email addresses for the users who will manage the website. And we will need access to any other accounts that will be integrated with the website, eg Twitter, Mailchimp.
