Websites — a guide to the whole section

This is everything we write about company websites: what to settle before anyone starts designing, what happens during the project, and what costs money for years afterwards once the site is up.

It is a switchboard, not a text to be read front to back. Eleven departments, each with its own entry page and its own set of articles.

Before the site exists

Three departments for the stage where there is no site yet, or there is one and a decision about a new one has been taken. It is the only stage where changing your mind costs nothing — decisions stay cheap right up until somebody acts on them.

"I don't know what kind of site I actually need." The department that sorts the words from the offers onto one axis: how a one-page presence differs from a landing page and from a full site, how to tell that the simplest option is enough, and when a website is not the first thing to spend money on. Four articles, from whether a site pays for itself at all to what has to appear on the simplest brochure site.

→ Types of websites — one axis instead of six categories

"The site exists, but I have no idea whether it does anything." Nine situations companies come to us with: planning before a project, an audit of what already stands, a rebuild forced by the calendar rather than by taste, and measuring results. These are the decisions that cannot be delegated to a supplier, because they are about why the site exists at all — rebuild versus optimisation, accessibility, and the four ways analytics can lie to you.

→ Website strategy — pick your stage

"I have two quotes and they differ several times over." The largest department, because the question about price comes back at every stage and means something different each time: the project quote, the recurring bills, the reason two offers for the same thing differ sixfold. Eight articles, plus two reference points in the switchboard itself: market medians and our own starting rates, with build and upkeep counted separately.

→ Website costs — what they are made of

While the site is being built

Five departments for the stage where the decisions have been taken and the work starts. This is usually where it turns out how much of that work sits with the client — nearly always more than they assumed.

"I'm commissioning a site and I don't know what will be needed from me." The order of the stages and the moment your decision is required. The most practical part covers the brief and the layout sketch — the two places where the client has the greatest influence on the result and usually does not use it. Four articles, including one on when a plain HTML site genuinely suffices and what happens to it afterwards.

→ Stages of building a website

"They showed me a mockup and I don't know what to judge in it." What gets settled in the design and what the code can no longer undo cheaply. Two articles and three tests you can run on your own site in a quarter of an hour, without anyone's help — one takes UX and UI apart into what can actually be assessed, the other takes the mobile layout and how much phone traffic you really have.

→ Website design — what is decided here

"The offer is full of words I don't understand." Nine articles about what to build a company site on, written for the person who has to make the decision rather than for a developer. They settle things that offers present as obvious: what headless actually buys you, where saving on hosting comes back as a cost, and what changing your mind will cost in three years.

→ Website technologies

"I want to do it myself and I don't know what with." Seven articles ordered by the stage you are at: which family of systems to pick, when a subscription builder is enough, what to put on WordPress, how to check a finished site and how to set up measurement so the numbers mean something. Most useful when you want to know where the line runs past which doing it yourself stops paying off.

→ Tools for building websites

"The site is waiting for copy and photos nobody has produced." The one part of a project you cannot buy together with the site — and the most common reason launches sit still for weeks. Four articles: where to get photographs legally, what to do when there is no idea for the content, when a company blog is a cost without a return, and what Google says in its own words about writing for search.

→ Content and media on a company site

Once the site is running

Three departments about what begins the day after launch — which is exactly where most offers end.

"The site is up, but nobody visits it." Five situations ordered by the problem rather than by the tool: no traffic, traffic but no enquiries, the whole presence sitting on somebody else's platform, a mailing list nobody does anything with. Each leads somewhere different, and confusing them is the most expensive mistake in this part.

→ Online marketing — where to start

"The site went down overnight and a client told me." Six ways into the department about what happens on a recurring basis: keeping the site up, keeping it fast, having somebody responsible for it, and surviving a change of supplier or host. These are the costs least discussed when a site is ordered and paid for throughout its life — including two purely emergency texts, on the error codes you see and on who to call when the server fails.

→ Website maintenance

"I'm afraid somebody will break in — or somebody already has." The department that starts with a list of accounts rather than with a firewall, because that is what actually happens to small companies. Six articles: updates, certificates, backups, privacy notices and data protection — and the three that matter most cost nothing. The certificate text answers the question people most often pay for unnecessarily: whether the free one is enough.

→ Company cybersecurity around a website

If none of those sentences fits

The order is usually this: start with the basics if there is no site, or with strategy if there is one and nobody knows whether it works. Both of those departments carry on by themselves — each is a switchboard just like this page.

If you are after a specific figure or a specific deadline, the shortest route is the cost or the maintenance department. And if you are looking for a supplier, that is a separate conversation and it does not run through articles — it runs through what you already have.