Questions
The questions
clients actually ask.
Including the awkward ones about money, privacy and what happens if you want to leave. If yours is not here, ask it directly — the answer will be just as plain.
- 20 questions
- Straight answers
Working together
- Who will I actually be dealing with?
- One person, start to finish. The developer who replies to your first message designs the site, writes the code, sets up the hosting and handles changes afterwards. There is no account manager, no handover to a production team and nobody to escalate to, because there is nobody else here.
- How long does a website take?
- Most sites go live in one to two weeks from the point your content arrives. The build is rarely the slow part — waiting on photos and text usually is. If you need it faster, say so up front; rush work is possible and is quoted separately.
- What do you need from me to start?
- Less than you think. A rough idea of what you want, any photos you already have, and your current site if there is one. Text can be messy — notes, voice memos, an old page to rewrite. Shaping it is part of the job.
- What if I do not like the design?
- Then we change it. You see real pages in a browser early, not a flat mockup at the end, specifically so that disagreements happen while they are still cheap to resolve. Revisions during the build are the process, not an extra charge.
Money
- Do I have to pay before you start?
- No. You see the site working before you pay for it. This has been the policy since the beginning — the 2012 version of this site said "do not EVER pay for a website up front" in those words, and it still holds. If any web designer in this industry asks you for the full amount before you have seen anything, treat it as a warning.
- Why are there no prices on the website?
- Because a single printed figure would be wrong for most people reading it. What a site costs depends on how much of it is custom. The packages page sets out exactly what each tier includes so you can judge scope, and a quote gives you a real number for your actual project, usually within a day.
- Are there ongoing costs?
- Hosting is ongoing, because it is an ongoing service — the server, the certificate, the backups and the updates all continue after launch. Everything else is one-off unless you ask for retained support. You will be told which is which before you agree to anything.
Privacy and discretion
- Will my real name appear anywhere?
- Not unless you want it to. Domain registration uses privacy protection, your legal name stays out of the site's markup and metadata, and photo location data is stripped on upload. These are defaults here, not an upgrade.
- Will you show my site to other people?
- No, unless you explicitly say yes. The portfolio page is empty for exactly this reason: clients have to opt in, not opt out. You can also change your mind later and I will take it down.
- Can people tell who built my site?
- Only if you want them to. A design credit in the footer is optional and off by default. Nothing in the code identifies the site as one of mine.
- What happens to the information in my contact form?
- It is emailed to you and not stored on the website. Inquiries sent through this site come to me by email and are not kept in a database — see the privacy policy.
Hosting and technical
- Will my host suspend me?
- Not the hosting I provide — that question is settled before your site launches rather than during an incident. What I cannot do is guarantee the behaviour of registrars, payment processors, CDNs or ad networks. Anyone who tells you they can is guessing with your business.
- Can I edit the site myself?
- Yes, on the Professional tier and above. Text, photos, rates, availability and tour dates are all yours to change, through screens named after the things you actually update. If you would rather I made the changes, that works too.
- Who owns my domain name?
- You do. It is registered in your name and you can transfer it away from me at any time, without asking. A site you cannot take with you is not yours.
- I have lost access to my current site. Is it recoverable?
- Often, yes. A developer who has gone quiet, a login that no longer works, a domain nobody can find the account for — these are common and usually solvable, and the content can frequently be recovered even when the site itself is gone. Ask before you give up and start from scratch.
Search and visibility
- Can you get me to the top of Google?
- No, and neither can anyone else. Search engines do not sell positions in organic results and they change their systems constantly. What can be promised is the work that genuinely influences rankings — a fast, technically sound, well-structured, honestly written site. Anyone guaranteeing you page one is either misleading you or planning something that will get your site penalised.
- How long until SEO work shows results?
- Technical improvements are measurable within days. Ranking changes usually take one to three months to appear and three to six to settle, and they move continuously after that as competitors publish and algorithms change. Any timeline more precise than that is invented.
Afterwards
- What if I stop working with you?
- You take the site. The code, the content, the database and the documentation, in a form another developer can pick up, and your domain moves whenever you say. Being easy to leave is deliberate — and it is the reason most clients do not.
- What if something breaks at 2am?
- Monitoring usually catches an outage before you do. For anything else, you contact the same person who built it. Realistic response times are agreed with you up front rather than printed as a slogan here.
- Will the site still work in five years?
- That is the intention, and it is why the stack is deliberately unfashionable — standard PHP and MariaDB on ordinary hosting, with no framework you will have to pay someone to upgrade. Platform updates are part of hosting, so the site stays on supported, patched versions without you thinking about it.
Start your website
Still want to ask something?
Ask it directly. You will get a straight answer, including when that answer is that I am not the right person for the job.
You will be talking to the developer.
Not an account manager, not a reseller, not a chatbot. The person who replies to your message is the person who builds and maintains the site — and who has been doing it for this industry since 2001.