Most businesses – of any size – need a website. For over 20 years, websites have dominated as the primary marketing tool in any business owner’s arsenal.

What a website says about you and your business is really important. How it looks, how it feels, whether the messaging and user journey is good, and whether it looks good on mobile: get any of these wrong and you could be leaving money on the table.

Many businesses pay a huge amount of money to a web development agency to build an all-singing, all-dancing website, but then can’t afford to keep them on to manage its technical elements. Sound familiar?!

Or, the business owner is left trying to keep the less-than-easy content management system up to date and get the website ranking for relevant search terms by future customers by staying on top of search engine optimisation.

I’m lucky to have been a content editor or manager on large-scale websites since 2009. I’ve worked on content management systems including Drupal, Wordpress, Craft, Typo3 – and more – and I know the ins and outs of those systems and how to produce compelling web content.

But for my clients, I usually advise against these. Why? Because they’re all highly technical systems that mean you’re locked in with expensive web development agencies once your website is launched.

Do the maths, and you’ll see the vast amounts that these websites will cost you over time.

The initial build might cost you £10,000 at the lower end of the scale, but then you’ll need a monthly support contract of between 5-10 hours, costing in the region of £1,000 to £1,500.

Parting ways with the developers puts you at risk of missing important software and theme updates, and eventually your once shiny website will simply stop working.

In the meantime, it’ll likely start to slow down, and elements will become defunct. Potential customers might find you, but simply leave your website once they're faced with broken functionality.

Here’s how we get around this: leaving you with a beautiful website that’s easy to manage, update and improve – all without breaking the bank.
 

Affordable websites: avoiding expensive mistakes

The good news? The days of small businesses needing a full web design agency are long gone.
 

Online web-building services like Wix and Squarespace have revolutionised and disrupted the DIY website industry. Now, literally anyone can build their own website and have it launched within a day.

And these self-build web platforms don’t even need a professional web designer to build them. Unless you need custom functionality, they can be built by marketing professionals too, at a much lower price.

What’s great about a web design platform like Wix for instance, is that you get access to a library of hundreds of existing themes, which can all be customised with your branding. That makes the build so much quicker than full-spec custom sites on a heavy-hitting technical CMS.

Wix is designed to make it easy to embed marketing integrations like Google Analytics and Search Console, connect to your emails for customer messaging and email marketing, and it even comes with a light CRM functionality (i.e. a customer pipeline). 

There are also absolutely loads of apps available on the Wix app marketplace, which we can install quickly and cheaply to help with everything from SEO and backlinks, to selling services and products, and displaying Google reviews.

But there is one caveat.

Even though it’s made building a website much easier, it’s still advisable to have someone with the right knowledge and experience put it together for you.

That’s where I come in: your friendly small business marketing professional.

A good website relies on great branding. It’s important to have a solid visual identity at the core of your website, and in place before the web build happens.

That’s why I offer a really simple package for small business owners. I’ll put together a new visual identity for you, showcasing your business in a way that is irresistible for your future customers.

Then, I’ll build a Wix-powered website based on SEO research, produce all the SEO-optimised content, and set up all the marketing integrations that you need. 

Within six weeks of agreeing the project, your new brand and website will be launched and running smoothly. You can even manage it yourself afterwards without too much hassle.
 

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New branding & website price: £2,995

There’s only one price for the branding and website build package, because I know exactly what’s involved with creating your new visual identity, and then building and launching a great website.

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Aftercare

Whilst you can look after your Wix website yourself after we launch, some clients prefer not to: they've already got so much on their plate, and marketing and websites aren't really their thing.

It’s really important to make sure that websites are kept up to date, because this helps avoid downtime, and makes your website work as hard and efficiently as possible for you. Google rewards fresh content - so let's not leave your website untouched and unloved because you don't have the time to update it!

I offer an affordable monthly website and content support package which we can tailor to your needs – and your budget.

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