Here's a few questions that we're often asked; they don't answer your question just contact us.
We are a friendly team, based in Reading, UK. We're approachable, enthusiastic, detail-conscious, and we know our subject.
We like to think we have good working relationships with all of our customers, and this is borne out by great feedback from them and long-term relationships.
Yes! About a quarter of our customers are based outside the UK.
We build a good number of multi-language websites (something that our CMS is very good at), and we build many sites with complex functionality, which often means customers can't find a regular local web designer to do what they need.
Despite having many remote customers, we like to meet customers in person whenever possible, or at least have frequent online contact.
We speak plain English to our customers — not too much technical jargon — and always give our best, objective advice, never sales-speak.
Being custom-designed — never from standard templates — every site looks different.
These days we are building punchy sites, with powerful images, not too much wordy content... but even that may be too much of a generalisation. We discuss the visual appearance and usability of the site with every customer, considering the desktop as well as mobile experience, and from that we create original, easy to navigate, modern, enticing sites.
See our portfolio of work for some great examples.
Sites are always custom-made and not from an oft-used "template", so a typical brochure website costs from around £1,000.
We offer advanced functionality, sometimes more or less out-of-the-box from Zenario; but when we don't have a ready-made solution we will propose a fixed cost to develop new functionality.
Nothing. Because your site will be content-managed, you will be able to make changes yourself.
When your site goes live, we will show you how to use Zenario, so that you feel comfortable making edits. You may just want to change text, maybe images and downloads; or you may have more technical skills and want to change the CSS of the site, or other things. You will be able to edit all of these things, according to what you feel comfortable with.
We will support you as well, and the cost of support is included in the hosting fee. This starts from just £400 per year, all-in, for Zenario Community.
We will always make further changes on your site for you; for example, importing or creating content, designing new graphics, even adding new functionality.
We can propose a cost for amendments; or we can work within a set time-charge budget; or we can work within an Extended Support contract, which provides the most cost-effective solution if you need regular work on your site.
Extended Support is usually a quarterly package and equates to a cost that's about 30% lower than our usual hourly rates. It also means we react very quickly, typically making changes on your site on the same day or early the next.
We build most sites on Zenario. We realise there are other good CMSs out there, but from considerable experience in the market we believe that none of them quite measures up to Zenario.
By concentrating on one platform, we can work more efficiently and can provide a massive range of features and adjustments, as our clients may require.
We offer Zenario as a hosted solution: the service includes not just physical hosting, but also support by phone, email, Skype and screen-sharing.
Yes. If you don't have a domain name already, we can help you find one; we can register the name and take care of DNS records. Our domain name registration service costs £50 per 2 years, and lets you just ask us by email for any number of subdomains, MX records, TXT records and other adjustments. Don't worry if you don't understand those technical terms; we will do this all for you, with no need for you to use a control panel!
SSL certificates are getting nearly standard these days on all but quite simple sites. They protect data in transit (important for personal data), they help search engines find your site, and they prove that you are serious about your site; all of these things translate into a more trusting experience for visitors to your website.
We can take care of the process of getting an SSL certificate and maintaining it on your website.
Yes. It will need to meet certain system requirements (such as running on Linux, MySQL, Apache) but we will happily build your site and install it on your server.
Despite this, most customers choose to host their sites on our platform. This is because our platform is less heavily utilised, and more speed efficient and secure, than most low-cost hosting providers.
In either case, we will never "lock you in" to our hosting; if at any time you wish to take your site and have it hosted by another provider, we'll give you everything you need (database, design files, software) so as to move away. We try to retain our hosted customers through excellent service, not tricky contract terms.
Yes, and you can have email addresses on the same domain as your website.
We have our own email service, competitively priced.
You will. Because we design bespoke sites for our customers, the design becomes yours on full settlement of our invoices.
We never make an additional charge for intellectual property of a design.
We can also provide you with source graphic files (again for free), and can even create high-resolution files that can be used in print, or for large-format purposes like exhibition stands, although this usually entails a small fee.
