What it costs
Starting points. Every job is quoted as a fixed price before it begins, and it does not move unless the scope does.
Building it
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A small site
from £7503–5 pages
Who you are, what you do, what it costs, how to reach you. A single-location shop is this size.
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A standard site
from £1,2006–12 pages
Room for a full service list with prices, a team page, reviews and a proper contact route. A stage school with four venues and a timetable is this size.
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Structured content
from £2,000
Where content has to stay in sync across pages — a timetable, a price list from one source, a blog with a publishing workflow.
What moves it: page count, whether the words and photographs exist, and how many forms. I will tell you which apply before quoting. The figure you agree is the figure you pay — half to start, half on handover, nothing added at the end.
Moving a site you already have
Same prices, by the same page count. What a move adds is below, and it is included.
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Your search rankings come with you
included
Every address on the old site is mapped to its place on the new one before launch, so nothing Google has indexed lands on a page that no longer exists. This is the step that gets skipped, and skipping it is how a business that ranked on the Tuesday stops ranking on the Wednesday.
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Your email keeps working
included
Moving a website and moving the mail are separate jobs that share one setting, which is why the mail is what breaks. Yours is checked before the switch and again after it.
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Nothing goes dark in between
included
The new site is built and signed off on a private copy while the old one carries on serving customers. The switch takes minutes, and if it goes wrong it goes back.
Quoted separately: a shop, a booking system or a members’ area, which have to be rebuilt rather than moved; and a blog archive past about twenty posts, where mapping the addresses is a job of its own rather than an afternoon.
Looking after it
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Essentials
£25per month
Changes included, turned around within five working days and shown to you on a private copy before they go live. Hosting, SSL, and the domain renewed on time.
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Looked after
£50per month
Everything above, with your changes first in the queue and turned around within three working days. Uptime monitoring, backups, and your site checked automatically every night with a monthly report. Once a year a person re-tests it rather than a machine — keyboard, screen reader, 400% zoom, narrow screen — written up the way a paid audit would be.
Changes are included. There is no meter running.
New prices, new opening hours, a member of staff who has joined or left, a paragraph that reads wrong, a photograph you would rather use — send it and it gets done. You are never working out whether a change is worth the invoice, which is how sites end up a year out of date.
What is a quoted piece of work rather than a change: new pages, new sections, and anything that needs designing rather than editing. That is building, not looking after, and you will have the price before it starts.
The difference between them is whether somebody is watching.
Both plans keep the site alive and current: it is hosted, the certificate stays valid, the domain does not lapse, and the words on it are whatever you last asked them to be rather than whatever they were the day it launched. Looked after adds the watching — every night something checks that the site is up, that every link still works, that no form has stopped submitting and that nothing has regressed, and once a month you get a plain page telling you what it found.
A site nobody looks after does not fail loudly. It fails on the Tuesday the domain quietly expires, or the week a form stops sending and the enquiries just stop. That is what you are paying somebody to prevent.
What a machine cannot tell you is whether a thing makes sense to use. One client’s old site passed every automated accessibility check and still pushed 660 pixels off the side of a phone screen on every page. Finding that needs a person at a narrow window, and that is what the yearly re-test on the larger plan is.
Neither plan ties you in. Cancel whenever you like — the domain and the files are already yours, which is the point. Taking no plan at all is a fair choice too: you take over the hosting account and either make the changes yourself or have anybody you like make them. What you give up is somebody doing it and somebody watching.
What you pay anybody else
Two things get billed by somebody other than me, and you should see them up front rather than find them later. Both are in your name and neither has anything added to it. Hosting and email forwarding are part of your plan, not a separate bill.
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Your domain
£10–15a year, to the registrar
Registered in your name, not mine, so it is yours whatever happens between us. Renewing it on time is part of your plan.
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A real mailbox
£4–7per person per month
Only if you want to send from the business address as well as receive at it. Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 or Fastmail, billed by them. Receiving is already covered.
Audits
An audit is the cheapest way to find out whether a rebuild is worth it. I check the site by keyboard and with a screen reader, measure every colour pairing, push it to 400% zoom and onto a narrow screen, and try every form including the ways people get them wrong. Automated tools run first, but they catch roughly a third of known issues and cannot tell you whether a thing makes sense to use — the rest is a person driving your site and writing down what happened. You get the findings ranked by impact, each with a plain-English fix.
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Accessibility audit
from £300can people use it
Measured against WCAG 2.2 AA. Driven by keyboard, listened to with a screen reader, pushed to 400% zoom and onto a 320-pixel screen, every colour pairing calculated rather than eyeballed.
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QA audit
from £300does it work
Every link, every form — including the ways people fill them in wrongly — on a phone and on a desktop. Plus what your page weighs and what it does to somebody on a bad signal.
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Combined
from £500both, one report
The two overlap in the middle, so booked together they are £500 rather than £600. One document, findings ranked by impact across both.
An audit tells you what is wrong and how to fix it. Fixing it is quoted separately, and an audit on a site I have never seen often ends in a recommendation not to rebuild — which is a real answer and worth £300 on its own.
The yearly re-test on a Looked after plan is this same process on a site I built and already know, which is why it sits inside a £50 plan rather than costing £500. Most of a cold audit is learning somebody else’s website.
Audits are invoiced on delivery.