When clients come to us they usually have a slew of questions when it comes to creating their first website. Everything from 'how much does a website design cost' to 'Can I edit the website myself'. Below is a list of commonly asked questions that all of our clients ask us before engaging with us.
How Much Will My New Website Design Cost?
This by far is the first question that everyone asks, and it is by far the most difficult to answer! The cost of your website will vary depending on your requirements. We can help with low budget websites that use templates as a base to help you get your business off the ground all the way to high end complex and custom web applications for government and enterprise business.
Get in touch for a custom quote or an initial ball park price estimate for your project.
What's the difference between a pre-made template website and a custom designed and developed website?
The obvious differences are the design and how the website will look and function. It will be unique to your brand and business and designed for your customers and their journey and experience throughout the website.
The not so obvious parts come down to how the website is structured and coded. Pre-made themes and templates need to cater for as many people and customers as possible. As a result, they often have more 'bloat' or code that isn't required for your specific needs. We code our custom themes and templates to be lightweight, and highly search engine optimised to get every advantage possible when it comes to competing in tough online markets. Being lightweight and a specific solution for you also means there will be less plugins and dependencies on third party tools or plugins. This helps reduce the amount of maintenance and potential security risks on your website.
In summary, custom designed websites are:
- Designed and tailored uniquely for your business
- Designed for your customers
- Built and optimised for search engine optimisation
- Built for speed and performance
- Easier to maintain
Who Writes or Provides the Content for My New Website Design
As you are the expert in your field for your business, we rely on you the client to provide the content that we need on the website. Whatever field you are in, from health to robotics and engineering, our depth of knowledge around the topic would be minuscule compared to yours.
We as designers and developers can help you organise the content and structure it in a way to work on the web, but we'll need your expertise to provide the content that your customers need to know to engage with your business.
If you are not good at writing or hate the idea of it, we can provide extra resources from our partners to help with content creation for your website.
How Long Does It Take to Design a Website
A pre-made template website can be turned around within a week with a dedicated website developer or web implementor working on the site full time.
A custom web designed and developed website naturally will take more time to bring into concept and develop, usually a period of three months. The creative and design process can take up to a month with approvals and feedback. Development will usually take another month to implement all of the various features and layouts.
Adding in content, which is usually the responsibility of the client, can take up the final third month as testing is also implemented at this point.
What Slows Down or Delays the Process of Delivering a Website Design or Web Development Project
There are two main factors that we have found to delay website design projects.
1. Lack of Content
If content hasn't been written for the website and the launch of the website is pending due to content not being added by our clients, then this will slow the launch or delay it indefinitely.
It's a good idea to think about the structure of the website, website content architecture and content on the website before or as soon as you engage with us. Then our team can help you fill in the gaps.
2. Approval Process & Time
When working with large organisations or extremely busy business owners, we have found that approvals by committee take the longest. It's important to delegate the authority for approvals and feedback to a small select group leading the website project. Usually no bigger than 3 people with experience or a background in digital technology or the web.
Small business owners that are time poor should set aside weekly appointments to keep things on track to deliver approvals in a timely manner. The faster we can get those approvals, the faster we can move forward and deliver your project.
Can I Edit and Manage My Own Website
Yes you can! We build websites using two popular content management systems, Joomla and WordPress. We've been using both for a long time and will choose the right solution depending on your business needs and your skills to be able to manage the website.
What Is Web Hosting
Web hosting is where your website lives on the Internet. Without a web host, the website won't be 'served' from anywhere. Hosting is an additional cost to the design and development process and charged on a monthly or annual basis. The team at PB Web Development will arrange appropriate hosting for you that will work with the new design & build of your website.
Where Can I Buy a Domain Name for my website?
We can manage that process for you, although CrazyDomains is quick and easy to use.
Who Will Hosts My New Website Design
We use several hosting partners when it comes to hosting your website. These include:
- SiteGround
- Pantheon
- WPEngine &
- Anchor Hosting
We've chosen these hosting partners as they provide different types of hosting environments that suit various clients and their needs. The team at PB Web Development will help you choose the appropriate hosting environment for your new website.
Do You Provide Training?
Yes! We provide on site, remote and pre-recorded video training for our clients. Just ask and we can arrange for a consultant to organise a training session for you.
Who Manages and Looks After My Website After Launch?
You have multiple options when it comes to managing and looking after your website.
We like to empower our clients to be able to do all of the updates and management themselves.
If you do require help and ongoing maintenance, we do provide managed services at a monthly rate with set monthly hours for updates, security and to help you with new content and updates when you need it.
On Going Support
We provide service level agreements for our corporate clients to give them the piece of mind that they have a design and development team to call upon whenever they need.
Our regular business clients can also tap into these services as required to help manage the business and website assets.
Do You Do Search Engine Optimisation?
Yes! In fact, all of our websites that are custom web designs or custom web development projects are built for search engine optimisation.
Since the inception of our company, we have been building and designing websites that are highly search engine optimised. We are able to tweak the layouts of a website to be semantic and use the latest Google schemas to provide context to what is on your website for the search engines.