Web Services
You should be able to log into your own website.
Sites that load quickly, say plainly what you do, and can still be updated in three years by whoever happens to be there on the day.
Most sites do not need replacing
The same rule applies here as everywhere else on this site. A website that says the right things and loads in a reasonable time is doing its job, and redesigning it because it looks like it was made a few years ago is spending money on the one thing your visitors care least about.
What usually needs attention is smaller and duller. Hours that changed in 2023. A page that takes eleven seconds on a phone because somebody uploaded a photograph straight from a camera. A form that stopped sending mail and has been silently dropping enquiries ever since, which nobody discovers, because a form that does nothing looks exactly like a form nobody used.
Fixing those costs a fraction of a rebuild and does considerably more for you.
The work, in four shapes
A new site, kept small
Most organizations need five or six pages that are genuinely good, not thirty that nobody has read since launch. Built so you can edit the words yourself without asking anybody, and written so the words are worth editing.
Repairing what you have
Speed, broken forms, mail that goes to junk, plugins that stopped being updated by their authors in 2021. Unglamorous, usually quick, and the highest return per dollar of anything on this page.
Keeping it running
Updates applied on purpose, backups that have actually been restored from, and certificates renewed before the browser starts warning your visitors away. The same quiet work as everywhere else, and it fails the same quiet way. More on that.
Getting it out of somewhere
Off a host that has quietly doubled its price, off a platform you have outgrown, or away from an agency you no longer wish to pay. Moving a site is ordinary work. Being unable to move it is the problem, and it is usually deliberate.
All of it should be in your name
The domain, the hosting account, the site itself, and the administrator password. Yours, registered to you, on an account you can sign into today without asking anybody’s permission.
This sounds obvious and it very often is not the case. A great many small organizations discover, usually at the worst moment, that their domain is registered to a designer who has moved on, or that the only person who can reach the hosting is the company they have just decided to stop paying. At that point the website is no longer an asset. It is a hostage, and the ransom is a monthly fee.
If the only person who can log into your hosting is the person you are paying, you do not have a website. You have a subscription.
So the keys go to you at the start, not at the end, and you can take the whole thing elsewhere any morning you like. I would rather you stayed because the work is good.
What I build with, and why
WordPress, in the main, and for one unromantic reason: you can leave. It is the most widely used software of its kind on earth, which means if I am hit by a bus there are a hundred thousand people who can pick your site up and carry on. That is worth more to you than any feature.
What I avoid is the layer that gets added on top. Page builders and heavyweight themes are quick to start with, and they store your content in a format that only they can read. Three years later the words on your own pages are locked inside somebody’s product, and moving away means retyping the site rather than moving it. I have taken those apart. It is a bad afternoon and it is entirely avoidable.
The same goes for plugins. Every one is somebody else’s code running on your site with full access to it, and a good number of them are free because the advertising inside them is the actual product. I keep the count low, prefer the ones with a company behind them, and where something small is needed I would rather write forty lines than install forty thousand.
The advantage of this being the same person
A website is not really a design project. It is a server, a domain, a mail configuration, a certificate, a database and a backup, with some pages on top. Most of what goes wrong with a site is not visual and is not the designer’s field.
When your contact form stops arriving, the cause is usually mail authentication rather than the form. When the site slows down, it is usually the host. When it goes off altogether, it is usually a certificate nobody renewed. Those are the same problems as everything else on this site, appearing in a browser instead of an office, and I would be looking at them for you either way.
If you want to see the sort of thing that hides inside a site that appears to be working perfectly well, here is one I wrote up.
Send me the address
Give me the web address of the site you already have and I will tell you what I would fix, what I would leave alone, and whether it needs replacing at all. Free, and more often than not the answer is that it does not.