After years of building websites for a wide variety of clients I tend to get the same questions asked over and over.
So I decided to write this article to help people that might have the same questions.
These questions are the most common I get for folks looking for a website redesign.

1. How much is it going to cost?

This is hands down the number 1 question I get asked most often. Not only is it the most asked question it’s typically the first question. While we understand most of our clients don’t have endless pockets of cash to throw around, it’s often the most difficult one to answer before we have talked about specifics.

To try to illustrate my point I use my realtor example. It would be similar to calling up a realtor and saying “I want to buy a house – how much will it cost?”.
There are lots of variables that will ultimately determine the price.

Things like:

• Is is a full ecommerce website or a more basic online ‘brochure’ type?,
• Do you need it tomorrow or in a few months?,
• What kind of functionality will it need to have – forms, calculators, memberships etc?.

You can get any ole Joe to build you a website for free or 100 bucks if you’re ok with ‘just having a website’.
For us a basic website could range from $1500 to $10,000. Yes that is a huge range, but then again so can peoples definition of ‘basic’ website. Furthermore, there is a difference between the one time costs vs ongoing costs. The one time costs tend to be design and development and domain name registration and ongoing costs are domain name renewals, hosting, and website maintenance.

2. Will I be able to make changes myself?

The short answer is yes. We only use a content management system called WordPress. That means you can login to your website and make changes. You can upload images, change text, add pages, add posts etc. If you want to make layout or structural changes that becomes more difficult for an average user.

3. Will my website show up as number 1 on Google? OR How do I get my website to rank #1 on Google?

With over 1,190,340,401 websites currently (as at the time of writing this) on the internet, getting your website noticed is not small task. There are literally hundreds of factors that Google and the other search engines use to determine where a website gets ranked within their search results. I wont get into all those but you can read this article “4 Quick SEO Tips – Web Design” if you want to dig deeper into it. That being said, even a small website can rank well – provided a it is built from the ground up using carefully thought out keywords and phrases AND gets updated regularly.

4. How long will it take?

Let’s jump back to our Realtor example again..How long will it take to buy/sell a house? It depends. It depends on how booked up I am, it depends on how long it will take the client to gather up content to be used on the website. How long it takes for approvals and often the larger the organization the longer the project. There might be bosses to run things by before decisions can be made. A typical basic website tends to take 2-3 months.

5. Will it look good on phones and tablets?

We only develop what are called ‘responsive’ websites – so the answer is yes. Responsive basically means that instead of the website just becoming smaller when viewed on a phone, the website actually adapts and ‘responds’ differently depending on the device used to view it.

6. What about updates?

Websites these days are designed differently than 10 years ago. More powerful software is used that allows for more functions. As with the use of all software they have regular updates released. They could be WordPress Core updates, plug-in updates, security updates etc. While it may appear as simple as pushing a ‘update’ button, sometimes and update to one piece of your website – might negatively affect another part of your website. Negatively affect could mean anything from an element being out of place on your website to a complete crash of your entire website. That is where most people will need a web professional to troubleshoot and fix the problem. So fixes might take a few minutes some might take a few hours.

So there you have it. The Six most asked questions I get about web design and websites. Are you thinking that your website might need a re-design?

Looking for a little help or guidance? Contact us, we’d be glad to help.

You need to re-design your website – it’s about 5 or 6 years old now and it doesn’t really meet your needs anymore. So you are out there speaking to a Web Designer or a Web design firm and the subject of maintenance comes up. You ask yourself “do I really need that?, my old website has been running for 5 or 6 years without any maintenance and it ran just fine – why would I need it now?”.

This is a very good question and one that I get often. I can almost use a bicycle vs car scenario to make my point. You had a bicycle and now you are getting a car. When you had your bicycle you didn’t have to (or very rarely) maintain it and it ran just fine. If you decided to upgrade to a car do you think you could get away with the same level of maintenance?

Your static website was likely written in such a way 5 or 6 years ago that someone with technical skills wrote/designed it and if there was a change needed you went back to that person or business to get it updated – because they had the technical skills to do so. Most small websites operated this way for a long time.

Now people don’t want to call someone every time they want to add something to their website. They want the ability to do it themselves. With something called a Content Management System (CMS) this was now possible. People now had the ability to login and add some content at their leisure. A CMS is what makes that possible. A CMS uses a database to accomplish these tasks.

There are many different CMS’s out there in the marketplace – but I am just going to speak about WordPress. WordPress is a free open source CMS that gives people the flexibility to do various things – some complex things you may still need a Web designer/Developer but by and large there are lots of things a non-technical person can do. WordPress uses a database and code to operate your website and it also uses various other programs called ‘plugins’ as well.

A WordPress website is essentially software programs that run in the background and just like other software – there are periodic software updates/released. Similar to how your operating system and smart phone regularly release updates to keep it running smooth.

Things like:

• Theme updates
• WordPress core program updates
• Security updates
• Plugin updates

So, similar to our car maintenance scenario our websites need regular maintenance as well.

Can I do them myself?

Its hard to give a certain yes or no on this one. Can everyone do the maintenance on their cars? Maybe some technical minded folks can do everything by themselves, others at the other end of the spectrum and perhaps have little to no knowledge may opt to have someone else trained to do these. Sometimes an update of one thing ‘breaks’ another thing and thats when an experienced pro can save you hours upon hours of troubleshooting.

What happens if I don’t install these updates/maintain my website?

Its difficult to predict what exactly would happen to a WordPress website if left untouched for a period of time. Things such as one day your website would start not looking right or be offline completely or possibly get hacked and who knows what some hacker would do with your website. I have had a client in the past that had their website hacked and their IP address and domain name ended up on blacklists. One of the major consequences was that the organization could not send out emails to people as the recipients servers had blacklisted theirs and would block ANY emails from their domain. It took them months to fully recover.

So, when you are asking yourself “Does my website really need to be maintained?”, I hope the above gives you food for thought to help you make your decision.

Looking for someone to do website maintenance on your WordPress website? We have maintenance plans available.