FAQs

Your website needs 2 things to be able to work on the internet, a domain name to use and hosting to show the website. The setup for your website depends on this, some questions to find out are:

• Who owns my domain name, specifically, what email address is the domain registered to? Only the owner of that email can authorise any actions to the registrar for the domain.
• Who hosts my website? Also, this will be linked to an email address, and often you can have more than one admin email that can authorise actions with your hosts.

If your domain and hosting is currently owned by your web provider, I always recommend getting those transferred into your name so that you are the rightful owner. You can always give them authoritative permissions without them owning your set up.

Choosing a good hosting company

Sometimes you just need to transfer out for whatever reason. Honestly, some hosting providers are far superior to others. Things to look out for:

• Are they always available in case your site goes down and you need emergency help?
• As above, are they easy to contact via whatsapp, email or phone call, or do they have layers of AI bots in chat windows that takes 10 minutes to finally speak to a living soul? Or is their contactability walled behind forms and systems?
• When you do get in touch with them, especially for tech support questions, are you speaking to a general agent hired to sit at a call center with a readable list of answers who knows nothing about hosting, or are you speaking to an actual tech guy/girl? Call center staff can't solve tech questions, they read from a booklet and don't have hands on experience.
• Are they in your country? If you need to call them on a landline, or sort out an issue, you want to know they can understand your language and give you local support.
• Do they support popular apps such as Wordpress, React etc to run on their servers?
• Is it easy to get login details for your server dashboard and send these to your web developer, independently of your develoer logging into your actual account area? Popular hosts now have 2FA authentication for all their login areas. This actually forces your account to be less private as it prevents developers from being able to access the server where they need to be as it is bound up behind logging into the users account. We don't want this - your account should always stay private, the hosts should be able to provide login server details for your developer on request or with your initial sign up as a default so that your developer does not access your personal account area.

Domain and hosting transfers

These are never easy or straight forward. We are at the mercy of a previous developer or the current hosts and there are many questions, who owns your hosting and domain, what is on your current server that needs to be transfered, who will you transfer to, are your emails backed up, are your current hosts engaged and ready to help you, or do you even own your domain and have any authority to ask for a transfer.

I've never had a website transfer that went perfectly, some go more smoothly than others, but mostly there are so many factors and third parties that often relying on them to action the transfer. It can be exhausting and challenging.

It is important to make sure that the hosts you are moving to support your current setup and the best ones are happy to transfer your info across to their servers, including your emails.

If your website is an old installation, it could break. Make sure you have your web developer handy and a proper backup created for when things go wrong.

Should you do a transfer, only you can make that informed decision.

SEO is a dedicated service in itself, the only topic that we will chat about here is the technical part that is built into your website.

Ranking on Google search

If your website is already up online and you are being found in searches, then any changes to your website content or meta will reflect within a few days to a week or two. The bot crawls our sites randomly but this is the average iteration period. The bot decides how relevant you are to a particular topic and ranks you in the search engine.

The only search engine we are interested in is Google, as it dominates the market.

If your domain and website are new, your site will not be indexed on search engines as yet, it will take a few weeks, perhaps months before your site is ranked, and this ranking will probably be very bad to start. Your site is still online, just not appearing in Google results yet. That is why it is important to start your seo process early, especially when beginnning a new website.

How does onboard SEO work

With the new age of AI, the way SEO is implemented into your website has actually not changed much, there are best practices that produce good results. These results are enduring, once the SEO is there, Google will rank you to infinity with your current setup. There is nothing else you need to do once you are showing in ranked results, you can leave it as is and actually, your SEO should improve over time, because time online gives you a better ranking as the years go by. But we shouldn't stop there.

Onboard SEO needs to be tweaked for best results, and this process takes time. Once first implemented or reworked, results need to be checked after some time online and then based on that feedback, changes should be made as necessary. This process should go on until the desired results are achieved.

Implementing SEO onboard can be a lengthy process and indepth, it can take many hours and patience, but is not always necessary to go that far. Once you have hit your goal, you can leave your site to mature like a good wine and do your regular blog updates etc. And in the last stage of SEO, your organic ranking is free, forever and can work better than any paid SEO.

This is one of the most frequently asked questions, what should I build my new website in, or should I rebuild my site onto a new platform. With this in mind, let's look at the options so you can make an informed decisions.

I believe it is generally best to stay away from really new platforms, as they may not be tested and trialed yet, and who wants to be the guinea pig when they are trying to market online. There are many popular platofrms to choose from.

Wordpress

Wordpress is probably the most popular open-source, free platform, you can also create working eshops using Woocommerce, and it is completely free with thousands of themes to choose from. If you want to start customising though that is when you would need to start purchasing tehemes or plugins for that extra functionality. Especially Woocommerce. Much of the Woocommerce eshop functionality is put into paid plugins. With that said, you can still run a completely free, working eshop with just the base Woocommerce free plugin.

Shopify

Shopify, as probably it's main contender, takes care of your hosting too, so you build on their servers online. As a consumer, Shopify is easier to get started with, you need to pay for it every month, and things can get pricey the more products / plugins etc you require. So it is not free. Also, since your webiste is on Shopify servers, Shopify has complete control of your setup and owndership, and has in the past, and probably will in the future take webistes off line or penalise as they see fit. You can land up with your site taken offline without your permission.

Both Shopify and Wordpress are customisable, developers are able to change your theme to exactly how you want it via their backend coding. This is very helpful and gives you a unique setup. You are also able to edit your own website through login dashboards for both platforms, so it allows you the ability to change your own content. Wordpress, however, is far superior when it comes to customisation and is much easier for developers to work with than with Shopify, all the coding has to be done on their browser and not on dedicated developer software, so it makes custom building in Shopify quite exhausting.

React & NextJS

React and NextJS are the newish contenders and have taken over much of the web market over the last years. They require a Full Stack developer to build and there is no limit.ation to the functionality you can get, This free platform is used extensively from websites to software development to mobile apps and there are extensive libraries to choose from.

You no longer are able to just build a website, but you can leverage the interactivity power of React to create really useful web apps for your users that are incredibly fast and have excellent performance ratings.

React has changed the game of waiting for a website to load or pages navigation loading, and all the drama of sluggish sites is replaced with the speed and efficiency of a platform built specifically to work fast and seamlessly in our modern times.

Everything is available, for free or using free tiers. Dashboards can be built relatively easily through available libraries, eshops can be seamlessly created, and there is no bloat, just clean, efficient code. It is definitely our present and our future at the moment and I highly recommend using it for any new builds unless you really have to build in another platform.

There are other platforms, not mentioned here, but hopefully you will gain some insight into these 3 main ones. Which one you should choose is entirely up to you, there is no right answer, but some perform better, some are easier to initially set up, some are more free than others with more functionality, and others need more development than others, it is your choice.

As a new client, an introductory call or meeting is mandatory for us to chat about your project. This helps us to be on the same page and to work through your goals, due date, required functionalities and general scope. From there, we can see if we will be a good match.

If we are a good match, we move on to pricing. This can vary based on what is required, but estimates can be challenging. As projects evolve, clients can require more functionality than was initially discussed, scope creep generally always takes over in most cases and this needs to be factored in to the overall time taken to complete the project and price.

We have tried to solve this with the use of time blocks, which sorts out the problem of you going over budget and getting a big, unexpected invoice and gives us the ability to do what needs to be done within a certain time frame.

Project commencement and due date needs to be discussed upfront and once payment is done, the project is then scheduled in at an agreed upon date. Because we have other projects on the go and a small, skilled team dedicated to that, your project can be in a queue. It is so important to be ready when your turn comes with whatever is required so that there is no stall time.

So a project stalls when we cannot get the content or confirmation needed from our client to keep going. If we set aside that week to work on your project, but couldn't proceed because of this, we have to keep working, and we then move another client's project into your scheduled slot. As a result, we may make promises and scheduled times for that client in the meantime which then takes your place until we get what we need from you and then can reschedule your work. It is so important to keep the feedback for your project coming so we can keep going!

We try to give you an idea of how long we think your project will take, and so how many hours you should buy, but this is guess work. Often what can be very safely achieved within a limiting budget is to do the web work in phases. We love working this way as it allows us to get each phase right so we have a firm foundation to build onto and gives us room to tweak and perfect.

It is so important to maintain your project. The internet is evolving quickly and new updates, coding practices & methods are updating constantly - keeping ahead of these is good practice and usually just takes an hour or 2 of maintaining every month. Having us to back you up in an emergency is a good idea. As a client who is paying for maintenance with us, you are a priority and we will jump the queue for you and work into the night if needed to get your site right. Not only that, but as we are maintaining your site, we will know the architecture well, we will probably have backup files, we will probably know it was down before you did.

Your site going down is not a matter of if, but when - maintenance is crucial.

The main idea behind web maintenance is not just doing small changes for you that you may not be able to do yourself, but it is about looking after your investment. As the first line of marketing on a global scale, your website needs to be polished and professional at all times. The little bits of incremental changes, updates and tweaking keep everything fresh and working. If you leave it, you will pay more to rebuild than if you just maintained.