We often get asked, ‘we only want a 4 page website’. If your website includes a blog, each blog post behaves as a separate page, so it makes no sense to charge per page!
A web page can be as long as the Gettysburg Address or as small as four hundred words, so why would we charge a set amount for varying size of items? It comes from the old days when people built static websites, website developers had to build websites one page at a time, so the more pages the more time it took to build a website and thus the fee was affected.
Now though, very few websites are static, they’re great for SEO and you don’t need HTML and CSS skills to update them. Having a website built in Drupal or WordPress means once set up (which is the time consuming part for us) adding pages can be done in an instant. Setting up galleries, slideshows, SEO, contact forms and testing them is the bulk of the work to be done, mostly by the website developer. For online shops, adding products and testing the payment process and security can be even more time consuming - hence the cost to set it is large depending on what your website is to do, but is not dependent on the amount of pages.
‘We only have small budget so just a one pager will do’ as with the section above on charging per page, a well built website will be a CMS one that a non-programmer can update. A one page website means a static website. A static website isn’t editable by a non-programmer, so any changes you want to make you will either have to pay someone to do or know HTML and do it yourself, either way could get expensive. When is comes to SEO, Google likes pages that are linked to others on the same website (and others) so one page websites unless linked to by other relevant websites won’t get registered by Google. Having a simple WordPress website as the absolute minimum you should have, it can have one page visible to the world which you can add to, but in reality it’s a many page website where not all the pages are accessible to the world and means you can make it into a fully fledged professional website when you’re ready, with very little cost to you. Build for longevity, it’s cheaper!
Drupal and WordPress need security updates run. Hackers release horrible things like Zero Day which attacked WordPress websites prior to version 4.2 and Drupalgeddon which affected Drupal 7.2. Scripts which act like the equivalent to computer viruses compromise specific versions of these open source CMS platforms and they’re not choosy about how big the company is whose website is hacked, in fact they can’t even tell how big a company is by its website.
If the security hasn’t been kept up to date your website will be in the firingline and it’s not if, it’s when your website will get hacked. This will show itself either by sending out masses of spam, blacklisting your mailserver and stopping your email and website, or putting inappropriate content onto your website. Either way you need to keep your website’s security up to date, anyone can get affected.
For website security solutions click chere
Google likes to show useful results to it’s users. If they continually get results of companies that have gone out of business appearing at the top, Google’s users will be pretty put off clicking onto websites that are of no use to them. Google checks is to see if your company is still going by checking how often your website is updated, if it’s very often, with lots of relevant content it ranks you higher!
It takes a little while for Google to notice your website. You can get it’s attention by registering your site on Google, setting up a Google Plus page now referred to Business page and put a link on your website to your Google page, setting up Google Analytics and Google WebTools. This will let Google know you exist, but be patient.
You need to ask yourself:
Are you updating your website regularly? No? You need to, read above ↑
Has it got enough pages? You need more than one for Google to notice you
Is there more than four hundred words per page? You need a minimum of four hundred words for Google to register your pages.
As mentioned above, a one page website, unless linked to by many others on the internet will not do well on Google. Don’t expect the world to come to you just because you have one page up, these days you have to try a bit harder than that.
Your website is made up of files and takes up space on the server it’s hosted on. Most website developers rent space on a from a service provider's, this costs a yearly or monthly fee. If they have their own server, this costs money to run, back up and maintain. If a website isn’t live your website’s database and files are still taking up room on the server at the expense of the website developer or hosting provider. So even if you’re website isn’t live hosting still needs to be charged.
Some people really are put off by spelling mistakes. Some think this is snobbery and only human to make mistakes others think this shows poor standards. It doesn’t cost much to have a copy checker go through your website and look for spelling and grammatical errors. Why lose business through a little carelessness.
In a recent post to a business group on Facebook, 8 out of ten people said ‘yes’ to being put off spelling mistakes on website.
If you have a Drupal or WordPress websites, they both are registered under the GPL licence
Click here for WordPress licence and Drupal licence
GPL is an open source license which means code licensed this way is owned by everybody, if you add code to a GPL licensed site it immediately gets covered by GPL.This means out of the box, no one owns the code, amendments and changes to that code are not even owned by the developer, not legally. GPL clearly states that no one has the right to obstruct access to the code. So if you’re moving your website to a new developer, the old one cannot stop the you from doing so, even if they say ‘hey that’s my code’ So you the website owner have full rights to what happens to YOUR website.
This is in line with our ethos of empowering our customers, we want you to be in control, we trust you to make the right decisions.
You don’t want to miss any enquiries! Some people like using Twitter, some Facebook, others hate social media so you need to be accessible in all places that you customers might be, even if you’re not posting to social media, have a presence to increase enquiry opportunities.
Out with the Ark! You’ve got to be pretty preflood to be thinking that having that links page to people who have links to you builds Google Rankings, that was some years ago. But having relevant one’s is still pretty good, a suppliers page can work, or guest blogs with links to the person who wrote them. Remember Google knows if you’re playing tricks, keep it relevant.
How can we help you with your website and website hosting...
