As you might expect, as web designers, we’re going to be a bit biased when it comes to comparing the value of websites against newspaper adverts. But we’re going to have a go at explaining just why small businesses should focus their marketing budget on the web, rather than on print.

This is especially true when there is a very small budget available.

Your money gets you more ‘inches’

Print advertising is notoriously expensive. In a local paper, a tiny advert could cost you the same as a single page website and a full page advert will get you a whole website.

 In a full page print advert you’re limited to what you can get across. Your company name, what you do, contact details and hopefully a USP or special offer.

However, in a full website you could get far more information across, which builds trust and engages the customer. It can save you time by answering basic questions directly and avoiding people who aren’t really potential customers. You could include information about your company background, more detail about a range of services  and rates, provide several contact options, display testimonials and even offer free advice to show the potential customer you really know your onions.

Your money lasts longer

The main disadvantage of a print ad is its limited lifetime. Most publications are monthly, weekly or even daily. That means that means that time period has passed, that money is lost forever. However, a website is there indefinitely. If it’s designed well, the same website could serve a small business for many years. There is a small ongoing hosting cost, that that is usually going to cost about the same as the rent for a phone line.

Websites are more targeted

Even if you target your publication very closely (and most people don’t), you can’t be sure that the customers are in the market for your product at that time. And if you just use a local newspaper, the vast majority of the readers will have no interest in your product or service. However, a website appears exactly when people search for it – you can’ get much more targeted than that.

If you're thinking of getting a website designed in Leeds, or anywhere across the UK, then give us a call for a chat about your project. We're happy to give free advice and suggestions as well as quotes and proposals.

There are a lot of web designers out there and the majority of them are sole traders, working alone from home offices. If you’re just starting out and finding your feet then the chances are you might not have a web design contract in place. But this is a risky omission.

Why a web designer needs a web design contract

Beginning web designers often shy away from having a web design contract because they don’t want to commit to particular things, because they’re not sure if they’ll be able to deliver. They may never have tried creating this or that feature or function, so they don’t want it in writing that they’re going to put it in.

But not having a contract means that it’s easy for clients to say that they assumed something would be done, and refuse to pay if it’s not added in. If everything’s in writing you can point out that a particular feature wasn’t specifically included. Of course, in most cases you’ll still ending up doing it to keep the client happy, but when it comes to the crunch at least you have a leg to stand on.

Why a web design client needs a contract

For pretty much the same reason as the web designer, the client benefits from having a written contract. That way, they can prove that an element or feature was included if the web designer is saying the project is complete, but they don’t believe it is.

What should a web design contract look like?

The good news is that the contract doesn’t have to be very complicated. Sure, if you can it’s best to get a professional lawyer to create you something, but people starting out in business rarely have the money to spend on that kind of thing.

One way is to find free template downloads of contracts that are available on the web. But you can simply create a word document with a list of the features that will be included, turn it into a PDF, and email it to the client. This forms a basic agreement.

Is email communication contractually binding?

Remember that email communications can form the basis of a contract or contract amendment, but only if you can prove that both parties have seen and agreed the details. In other words, if you send information to the other party but s/he never replies to that specifically, it is not legally binding. But if they reply to the email and confirm agreement, then it is.

Read about how much different websites cost - using a tortured transport analogy on our main web design site.

We offer managed hosting services with all our websites, because we care about the long term performance of our products and about making a meaningful difference to our clients' businesses.

However, sometimes potential clients look at the budget options that are available online and wonder why we aren't matching those prices. Other times, they want to know if they can use us to make the website, but then move over to cheap hosting to reduce ongoing costs. Some people (heaven forbid) might even suspect that we're simply trying to squeeze as much money out of them as possible. This simply isn't how we do business.

Here's the real reason:

Why we don't complete on price when it comes to hosting

We don't complete on price, because it would mean making huge sacrifices in quality and service, which would result in poor performance and unhappy clients (or going bust - resulting in unhappy us).

A good technological platform with robust backups and redundancy to make sure the website loads quickly and never goes down takes investment, and that costs money. On top of that, we want to make sure our staff are available and have time to deal with each client's query patiently and properly.

We believe that our prices are extremely reasonable when you consider the level of high quality hardware, software and genuine personal service we provide.

Why we won't put our websites on other hosts

In the past we have agreed to make websites and then host them on other servers, but we no longer allow this, because of the headaches that have arisen for both us and our clients.

The problem is that cheap hosts are cheap for a reason. These companies usually sacrifice quality of hardware and software and customer service, in order to drive their prices to the absolute minimum. This means that servers are unreliable and overloaded, meaning the clients' website runs slowly and may frequently dissappear altogether.

It also means that the customer service is impossible to get hold of, unskilled and in such a rush they simply send autoreplies without finding out about the problem properly. This wastes a great deal of time and contributes to high blood pressure and hair loss (not clinically proven).


When this happens, the client comes back to us, and it's our word against their that the poor website performance is all about the host, and nothing to do with our work - which would have worked great if we were hosting it. And because we're soft, we often end up sorting out these problems where the cheap host refuses too.

What do you mean 'to begin with'?

The reasons stated above are why we insist on hosting our websites - not because we're trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of our clients - and to prove it, we DO allow clients to move, but only after we've proven the quality of the website on our hosting and support platforms first.

If, after this has been proven a client still feels they wish to move away, then they can - at their own risk...

If you're thinking of getting a website designed in Leeds, or anywhere across the UK, then give us a call for a chat about your project. We're happy to give free advice and suggestions as well as quotes and proposals.

Or if you need help with your computer - anything from fixing a broken laptop to maintaining a snappy response, then check out our associates, who offer great IT Support Services, from their base in Guildford.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to pay a lot of money for a website but then hide your contact details away.

This is a shortened version of the full article about making sure your contact details are clear, which you can read here.

Your phone number should be a clear beacon, immediately visible above the fold (preferably at the top of the page) in large font that can be read even by those who are partially sighted. Especially by those who are partially sighted. They are the ones who need it most as they will find it frustrating to browse the website.

You should offer an email address and get a decent junk mail filter to deal with the spam that is inevitable from publishing an email address on the internet. You can also take steps to obfuscate your email address from robot crawlers. Not offering an email address because you're afraid of spam is like slamming your door in people's faces. Not good.

And you should also have an enquiry form on the contact page (or even at the side of all pages), as some people prefer having the guidance of little boxes to fill in, because they don't want to expend the brain power involved in composing an email from scratch. And who are you to argue?

And finally, you could offer an online chat service but you need to be careful with this or it could do more harm than good. If it's constantly unavailable, or if the people take ages to reply (possibly because they're trying to deal with too many chats at the same time) and leave your customer sitting around twiddling their thumbs waiting for a response, or if your customer service agents are impolite or abrupt, then your customers will be turned off.

By utilising all these methods (effectively), you give people every option they could desire and reduce the likelihood of them getting turned off and heading to one of your competitors instead.

If you liked this blog post, you might like to read our article on Five elements of great web design or web design and colour.

Sentiva web design make websites, software and mobile apps.

For a few years now, BT and Yell have pursued a hard sell in getting UK sole traders and small business owners to purchase one of their websites.

They use aggressive marketing techniques and make promises they don't deliver on, while supplying a poor quality product that looks cheap at first glance, but in the long term ends up being quite pricey - certainly more than it's worth.

This is a shortened version of the full article, which goes into a lot more detail about the points below. If you want to read The Truth about websites from BT and Yell, click here.

Anything we can put up on this blog will be a drop in the ocean compared to the thousands of cold calls and massive marketing spend these large companies have, but we thought we'd write a blog post to try to warn anyone who's considering buying a website from BT or Yell - based on our own experiences with their marketing department and stories that have been relayed to us by business owners we've met.

It's understandable that sole traders and small businesses have a limited budget, so can't necessarily afford a full bespoke website from a design agency (where it may start at around £600+vat) for a decent website, but our advice would be to avoid these particular companies at all costs.

If you want a cheap website, then it's worth considering one of the free blog platforms, such as Blogger or Wordpress, or using a service like Wix or Mr Site. These services can help you get something cheap and cheerful online for free or very cheap - and it can't be any worse than the rubbish you'll pay hundreds of pounds per year to Yell or BT for.

Or, if you have a little bit more money to spend, check out our web design services ; )

The core problems with BT and Yell's web design service are fourfold. They start with a relentless hard sell, which is no way to do business. They use production line templates and simply stuff the content in without any care or pride in theit work. The staff are unskilled and spout jargon with only the vaguest idea of what they're saying and the ongoing service is poor to nonexistent - basically, once they've got your money, you're of no interest to them.

That's the business model they have in order to get a large throughput to make it worth charging low prices while still making huge profits. We shouldn't be surprised that large companies behave in this way - but it's not going to do you any favours if you're the little guy. To read our explanations of these four sections in more detail, check out the full article about BT and Yell websites.

And, if you found this article useful, you may want to check out our web design and SEO resource bank.

A website can cost anything from nothing, to millions of pounds. So how do you know how much is the 'right' amount to be spending on your business website? 

Note - this is s summarised version of the full web design cost article.

Free Websites

Getting your relative or mate’s mate to design the website for free may seem a good idea, but in the majority of cases the good intention turns into a chore – with you feeling guilty for asking for anything and them resenting the time it’s taking, and putting it off for weeks, even months.
And unless they’re a professional, you’ve still got the problem of having an amateur job.
So, you may decide to bite the bullet and pay a web designer…

Cheap Websites (a few hundred pounds)

A brochure website from a professional web company can contain images of your products, services and work you've done and testimonials from previous clients. It shows that you're serious about what you do and solid enough to have invested in a professional website.

Professional Small Business Websites (£500 - £1000)

A professional website built by a decent company will have a nice amount of content (around eight to twelve pages), giving a good overview of your business, building trust and encouraging visitors to get in touch. It will also be optimised for Google to ensure it gets in front of the right people.

Enterprise Level Website (£1,000 - £10,000)

The website could become a central part of the business itself, adding value, and adding to your bottom line. It could include online services such as: ecommerce, online quotes, members only areas, surveys, technical calculators
 

Big Fish Website (£10,000 - £150,000+)

If you have an established brand and a strong online focus, the sky’s the limit with what your website can do. An ecommerce store for a department store could have thousands of pages, multiple relational search facilities and serve millions of users per day, or an online banking facility could run into the millions and will require a team of people to maintain the content and code.

Read about how much different websites cost - using a tortured transport analogy on our main web design site.