Your website: the guide for business owners
This page covers the whole subject, from the moment you think about building a site to the moment you decide to replace it. It assumes nothing technical. Where the subject goes deeper, I will point you to the article that handles it in detail.
Before you commission anyone
The most expensive mistake is not made during the build, it is made before it. It is made the moment you ask for quotes without having decided what the site is supposed to achieve. Three quotes for «a website» are three quotes for three different things, and the cheapest one wins for the wrong reason.
What to ask and what to watch for in that conversation is in what to watch before you commission your site. What it actually costs, broken down rather than given as one number, is in what a site that brings customers really costs. And the comparison between a ready-made platform, a ready-made theme and building from scratch is in Wix, template or custom site.
What has to be yours, and usually is not
Most people discover this chapter at the worst possible moment: when they want to change supplier, or when they cannot find the one they had. You may have paid for the site and still not own it, in the sense that you cannot take it and leave.
The nine things you need to know where to find, named one by one, are in your site's folder. And the most critical of them, because without it none of the rest exists, is covered separately in who really owns your domain.
Where your site lives, and why cheap turns out expensive
Hosting is the floor everything else stands on. When it is poor, you do not find out from an error message. You find out from visitors who never arrived, emails that never landed, and hours spent on something that should not have been happening.
Why a difference of a few euros a month costs many times that is in why cheap hosting costs more. And what those advertised availability percentages mean in practice is in how far down your site goes.
Speed, which is not a matter of appearances
The visitor has no patience and owes you nothing. If the page is slow they leave, and they will never tell you. The good news is that in the overwhelming majority of cases two things are to blame, and both are fixable.
What is measured and why it affects sales is in Core Web Vitals. The first of the two usual causes, and the easier one, is in images: half the weight of your page. And the mechanism that saves half the work when it is set up properly is in caching: the copy that saves half the work.
The phone, where more than half your visitors are
A site that looks fine on a desk monitor can be useless on a phone, and you may never find out, because you look at it from your computer. The phone number that is not visible without scrolling, the menu that does not open, the form with eight fields: that is where customers are lost quietly.
What a phone user sees and does not see is in what the phone user sees on your site. And when it is worth going a step further, to an app installed straight from the browser, is in PWA: what it is and when it is worth it.
It shows up on Google, but the phone does not ring
This is the complaint I hear most, and it is almost never a visibility problem. It is a problem with the path from visit to enquiry, which nobody designed because everybody assumed it would happen by itself.
The causes, one by one, are in why your site is on Google but the phone is not ringing. And something that comes even before the visit, namely what people see about you before they open your site at all, is in your first impression is not your site.
If you also speak to people abroad
A bilingual site is not the single-language one run through a translator. It is a different structure, different addresses, different signals to the engines, and often different content, because a foreign visitor does not ask the same questions.
What changes in practice is in a multilingual site is structure, not translation.
When it is time to replace it
No site breaks suddenly. It gradually stops being true: your services change, devices change, the person who built it moves on. The question is not whether the moment arrives, but whether you recognise it before it costs you.
The seven signs most people ignore are in when it is time to replace your site. And four checks you can run yourself today, with no technical knowledge, are in four things you do not know about your site.
Five times we did it, with numbers
Because all of the above sounds easy while someone is writing it, five real jobs. An online shop that went from 19 seconds to 4.4. A yacht charter site that went from 40-odd plugins and 35 GB to 9 and 7 GB. A 2003 business program that now files documents with the Greek tax system. An interactive touch-screen application for an exhibition. And the unification of our own applications into one ecosystem with one account.
And the part this page does not cover
Your site also has to be found. How customers locate you today, and what changes now that many of them ask an engine instead of searching, is a separate subject with its own page: the guide to answer engines (AI).
Frequently asked questions
What does a serious website cost?
It depends on what it has to do, and «it depends» here is not an evasion. A presentation site, an online shop and an application with user accounts are three different things. What matters before you ask for a price is knowing what you want to achieve, otherwise you are comparing quotes that cannot be compared.
What has to be mine rather than the builder's?
The domain, the hosting account, the code, the backups, the measurement accounts and the keys to every service the site uses. If any of those is in somebody else's name, the site is not fully yours, however good your relationship with them is.
How fast does it have to be?
Fast enough that the visitor does not leave before seeing anything. In practice that means the main content appearing within two and a half seconds on a phone, on an average connection. The two most common causes of delay are images and add-ons that load from elsewhere.
How often does a site need replacing?
There is no expiry date. There are signs: you do not update it because it is difficult, it does not work properly on a phone, you cannot find whoever maintains it, or the business has changed and the site still shows the old one. One of those is worth a conversation, three together mean you are already paying for it.
WordPress, a ready-made theme, or built from scratch?
All three are correct answers to different questions. What matters is not the technology but what happens when a change is needed: how easily, by whom, and at what cost. Many «economical» options are cheap to buy and expensive to live with.
My site shows up on Google but the phone does not ring. Why?
Usually because a visit and an enquiry are two different things, and the second one was never designed. Check whether the phone number is visible without scrolling on a phone, whether the form actually reaches your inbox, and whether the page says clearly what you do and for whom.
And if you want someone to look at it?
Most of what you just read you can check yourself, free, in an afternoon. If you would rather someone took it on, it is our job and we describe it on the website development page and under maintenance and support.
And if you simply want an opinion on where you stand today, send us your site's address.