Unless you understand all of the aspects of web design such as building a website to work across multiple devices, or how to make pages that web crawlers (a search engine robot) can effectively read, you are probably in need of web designer! If you have a goal in mind, you can contact us to discuss options, and we can provide recommendations in order for you to achieve the best results.

You only need a web developer if you have a website or you want one! A web developer will help you set up your hosting and domain name which are needed for a website. After this, the web developer would hand it to a web designer and they would pass it back and forth hundreds of times until it was complete and functional. After the website is complete, you do not need the web designer again unless you want to make a change or redesign your website. You do however, still need a web developer to keep your website in good condition and maintained. 

Web design includes the blueprinting and building of the user-facing elements and ensuring they display correctly. A web developer is working on the things the users don’t see, including the database, hosting, domain names and email addresses. They are similar and in some cases their skills do overlap, but you often find both a designer and a developer website project.

It depends on the complexity of the website. With smaller more simple websites, you could see a new page created every couple of days. If you have designs, ideas, and content ready it could be quicker. If you have purchased a plan from us, you can have a home page ready within 48 hours. Please note that this varies depending on whether we already have access to some of your content such as a logo, images, and text.

After paying for the website to be built, you will only have a few recurring bills. You will need to pay for your hosting, domain, and SSL certificate (covered lower down in the F.A.Qs). You can get all of these for as little as £50 a year. If you stay with us on a maintenance plan, your licenses are covered by us. If you then leave us however, you will need to pay for the license of the software used on your website. The software will still perform but you cannot update it without a valid license. You will also need to pay for any licenses unique to you, a good example of this is your google maps API.  

After the cost of the entire website, the basic web store costs nothing extra to run as you are paying for the website and the store is an extra part of it. You will need to pay £2.50 to add a product to the store. This is a one-off fee and it will add a product, including an image, name, price, and any variants you may have i.e. 100g / 200g /300g or S/M/L so on. You can add a category, description, additional info, and also product reviews. Once your product is live, customers can purchase them as long as you have stock.
For 10 products you would pay £25 and you have them forever. Once all your products are live, you do not pay for anything else. 

In theory, as many as you like! In practice, it is limited by your hosting. If you only have 1-99 products you should manage on a basic hosting plan, but once you get into triple digits you may need a more powerful hosting provider. But once we have overcome this hurdle the sky is the limit. If you have any questions regarding products or web stores, please contact us and we will be happy to discuss options and explain further.

Unless you want something extra you don’t pay extra. You will get all of the basic functionality of a web store and if you want something that is a little more work or requires further licenses, we can work with you to provide and support this but may be a fee included.

You would have two accounts for your web store when we create it. The first account would have full permissions for the web store, including us. Accessing this account could make or break the website. If we are maintaining your web store, we highly recommend that you store the credentials for the future and do not actually log in. However, this account will be needed if you ever leave us and need to hand the site over to a new team, or if you purchase the handbook and want to maintain it yourself. The second account will be a “shop manager” account, which gives you a more streamlined webpage for processing your orders. Once you are logged in, all of your orders will be there ready for you to see and act upon.

Most major banks and PayPal are the most common methods of payments used with a web store. Once integrated, the cash will be flowing as fast as you can make sales. You will get a notification of payment when a user makes a purchase.

A maintenance plan includes a developer going into your website and having a tidy up at certain predetermined times. This can include an update, removal of a bug, optimization, health checks, virus scans, and finally a backup (explained further in the F.A.Q). The price you pay will determine the depth of the maintenance provided, the frequency of the maintenance, and the backups that occur.

The main difference is the depth and the frequency of the maintenance. The bronze plan only provides you with the basics and it only happens once a month, so the website has to hold itself together for a longer period of time. The silver plan increases the maintenance to every two weeks and adds the database checks option (a step towards optimizing the websites performance). We recommend this plan for most websites. The gold plan is performed weekly and adds a health check (a detailed performance review). This will result in a website with little to no downtime or visual errors.

The bronze plan is designed for basic websites with common functions. If your website is used for advertising your business and it is effectively a digital poster with a contact form, this plan makes sure it runs well with no issues. Also, it is backed up once a month. 

The silver plan is for websites that have a little more functionality. Users can sign up and therefore, a database that needs to be backed up more frequently. This keeps the website performing well under all the traffic and ensures that no more than 2 weeks of data is lost at any given time.

The gold plan is for the web stores that have hundreds or thousands of products with just as many customers. The gold plan has a developer’s eyes on the website every week. At this level of observation, it is very unlikely that anything will go wrong, and if it does you will lose no more than 7 days of data.

We use software to take an exact copy of your entire website and place it in a different location. This way, if the server building where your website is stored is destroyed or disabled, we have a copy of your website to get you back up and running quickly.  

We do not provide daily backups as they are very time-consuming, however, we can implement other solutions to automate the process. These however, can become costly. For further information or to discuss backups with us, please contact us and we are happy to help.

When users are on your website, you can see what pages they are viewing and conversely, the ones they ignore. Knowing your users behaviour can help you identify problems in your sales tactics. For example, you just dropped your latest product but your users can’t see it because they often don’t make it to the page it is on. Now you know it’s the effectiveness of the display and not the product itself leading to poor sales. Now add a banner to your homepage to drive traffic to the latest product and watch the sale roll in.  

When you obtain your domain name and hosting, you can set up an email address linked to your website’s domain name. Once you have “You@Yourbuisness.co.uk” you can simply use webmail service providers like outlook or Gmail. After all of this is complete, you can use it like a regular email address. Depending on the hosting plan you opt for, you may have unlimited email accounts for staff members to use too.

When your website is complete, it needs to be kept up to date and backed up. It may also need products adding to a store frequently. If you do not want to pay a professional to complete these tasks, then the handbook will cover the basics of keeping your website in good condition and safe. It will include a step-by-step guide with accompanying images allowing you to perform the maintenance, add your products, run backups, and other things depending on your website functions. This allows you to maintain your new website by yourself at your own pace. We recommend checking on a website at least once a month as a minimum to ensure it is working correctly.

A domain name is a unique address that identifies your website. Ours is armstrongwebsolutions.co.uk. This is basically your internet address so that traffic knows where it’s going. They are limited as they are unique so you may need to make one to fit your business name. If your name is already taken, you won’t be getting google.com any time soon unless you pay a large sum. For queries regarding domain names, please contact us and we are happy to help.

Web hosting is the physical computer that your website runs on. You can host a website yourself but it requires a specialized computer running continuously, and can get quite complicated. For these reasons, it is much more simple to outsource it to other companies. There are dozens of companies that all offer different things at different rates. Some provide web hosting from as little as £1 a month. We will help you find the best one for your needs, and don’t worry, you can move your website from host to host at any time.

When you visit a website, you will often see a padlock located to the left of the domain name. This indicates that a secure sockets layer certificate is active on the website and its hosting. The certificate provides the website with basic encryption so that only the users and the website can read the data. This is a minimum requirement for websites that take and save user information, such as bank details and other sensitive data. They are cheap and easy to install and you often renew them yearly.

WordPress is an open-source content management system (CMS) that uses themes and plugins, which dictate the look and layout of the website. These can add extra functions to the website. The CMS are platforms that allow users to build and edit websites with little to no coding knowledge. It’s this that allows us to make the handbook. You don’t need to know how to write any code, but you can still take charge of your website. It is still very complex and knowing code is a valuable asset, but this will allow our clients to perform basic tasks by themselves. All of the complicated bits happens in Divi, but once we are done, it will just need to be maintained and updated. 

When building your website, you need to select a theme from a catalogue of over 10,000. Each theme has their own colours, layouts and purposes. Divi is a theme and a theme builder rolled into one. We pay for the license too, so you get to keep it on your website forever. Using Divi means that no part of the website is off limits and we have full control of every aspect of the websites design. This combined with our years of expertise and a few select plugins, we can do almost anything.

Plugins are small pieces of code that are packed up and ready to go, saving hours of copying, pasting and writing new code. They can however, become very large and/or expensive. We only use a small selection of trusted plugins and they are one of the world leaders in their given niche. We do prefer to solve the problem with our own code, but in some cases it may be cheaper to use a plugin, especially the ones that can automate hour long processes as they save you money you would have paid a developer to perform the same task.