Frequently Asked Questions

Even though we are London-based we have worked very successfully for clients across the UK, and even abroad.

We use an online project management system (basecamp) which allows you to watch your project in production and share documents, ideas and comments in one place - your web browser. This makes it much easier for you and your colleagues to collaborate on a project with our team.

We also provide virtual support for your website once it is launched that is effective and responsive, regardless of your location.

Using a freelancer can be a lot cheaper than using an agency, but there are several pitfalls.

One freelancer does not have the range of skills to provide a properly conceived, designed and built website for a business. Usually the result will be good in one or two respects, and poor in the rest e.g. the site looks great but doesn't work in all browsers and is difficult to manage. Or the site is great, but takes 6 months to deliver (he has got other jobs!).

If your website is important to you, it's always more cost-effective to use an agency.

It depends what you want from your website - a great marketing tool, or simply a presence on the web.

If you want templated design, with limited ability to edit and manage your site, there are agencies who can provide websites for as little as £500.

If you want a bespoke design that fits your brand and your business, together with a decent site management system, you will need to spend more.

The advantage is that you will have a site that performs better - turning more visitors into contacts and hence potential customers. Our budgets range from £2,000 for small 'brochureware' sites through to £30,000 for mid-range corporate sites with the management tools and features you would expect.

The sites we produce are designed to have a very large impact on your ability to secure and maintain business via the web.

Prices for websites can vary wildly.

Here's a rough guide - as relevant to a corporate client as it is to a small business:

£500 - £1,500 will buy you a templated website from a low-budget agency.  The site may look ok, but it will be an adaption of something they've already sold.  The technology will be dubious - probably not very search engine friendly and difficult to manage.  You might get a few standard features, but any bespoke work will cost as much as if you went with a professional agency.

£2,000 - £15,000 should be enough for a properly built website for most small to mid-size businesses.  You should expect a range of features and a high standard of design.  Choosing the right agency is the biggest challenge - some will be better on technology, some on design.

£15,000 - £25,000 buys a fairly sophisticated website for the smaller corporate customer - either because a lot of work has gone into the design, it has a lot of pages (100+) or because it has several bespoke features.

£25,000 - £50,000 sounds like you are being charged too much - unless you are a mid-range corporate client that needs a range of features - say 200+ pages of content, multiple languages, integration with back office systems and lots of account management to ensure everything runs smoothly.

Not being able to manage the content on your own site, as and when you want to, is a bit like using a typing pool instead of Word.

Why should you have to call an agency, log a request and pay money, when you could just do it yourself in a web browser?

Content management systems put you in charge, reduce your ongoing costs and save hassle and time.

The content management system we use is designed and built by a global team of developers - literally hundreds of people contributing to both the core system and the hundreds of modules that add all kinds of extra functionality.

By contrast, an agency that has built their own content management system will typically have 2-3 developers working on it at any time. There is simply no comparison in terms quality, stability and functionality between the two options.

Open-source is the future - agency-brewed is the past.

All the sites we build are hand-coded.

The content management system and all the modules that are available have been hand-coded and tested by hundreds of open-source developers world-wide. On top of this, we create any custom code that is required and we hand code the site pages that are required.

This ensures you get a great site at the lowest cost - by leveraging 'open-source' and then adding your custom requirements.

We provide bespoke features all the time.

Although most of the system we provide is pre-built, we can still provide any bespoke functionality you might need. Open-source makes it very easy to add features - it's part of the whole principle of open-source that adding special functionality is as easy as possible.

That said, the system we use has literally hundreds of modules, providing all kinds of features, pre-built and ready to go.

Good question.  Here's the answer:

• We can provide lots of references.
• We've probably worked in your sector before.
• We give you 'open-source' technology, not 'home-brewed'.

But the real way to decide is through meeting us and talking to us.