01 Process
The useful part of this page is not the stages. It is the list further down of what gets checked before a site is called finished, because that is the part most people never get told and have no way to ask about.
01
Day one
Twenty minutes on what the business does, who you want to hear from, and what the site has to achieve. Not a pitch: mostly questions, because the useful answer depends on things I cannot guess.
You get a written scope and a fixed price within a couple of days. If what you need is not what I do, I say so on the call rather than after your deposit has cleared.
02
Week one
Not a flat picture of a website. A real page you can open on your own phone, because a picture tells you nothing about how something behaves when you touch it, how it reflows at an awkward width, or how it feels to scroll.
This is the cheap place to change your mind, so this is where we do the changing. Type, colour, structure and the actual words all get settled here.
03
Weeks two and three
Every page written, including the legal ones nobody enjoys. Photographs sized, converted and given alt text written from the photograph rather than from its file name.
Anything you have not supplied yet renders as a red marker in the place it will occupy, rather than as convincing filler. It is visible on every screenshot until it is real.
04
Before handover
Four harnesses run against the built site, not against the source, because the built site is what a visitor actually receives. Any one of them failing stops the handover.
You get the output. That is the point of running them: so you can check my work instead of taking my word for it.
05
Handover
On your domain, in your hosting account, in your name, code included. A written handover in English explaining how to change anything and what it costs to run.
Two rounds of changes after you have had it in front of real people. Then it is yours, and nothing stops working if you never speak to me again.
02 The audit pass, in full
These run as scripts against the built site. They are not a checklist somebody works through by eye at the end of a Friday, which is the version of this that everybody has and nobody completes.
01
Crawls every page reachable from the homepage.
02
axe-core against every page in the sitemap, at 390px and 1440px.
03
Checks the built CSS and HTML against the patterns that read as machine generated.
04
Checks that the things the build optimised still work.
03 What I need from you
What the business does and who you want to hear from. Any photographs you own, at the largest size you have them, straight off the camera or the phone rather than pulled back off Instagram. Your real contact details, and any registration or licence number you are legally required to display.
I write the copy. Most people expect to have to produce it and dread it, and it is the single most common reason a website sits unfinished for a year.
What I cannot invent is anything a customer could check: a certification, a number of years, an insurance figure, a review. Those either come from you or they do not go on the site.
04 What happens if it goes wrong
If the design is not right, we keep going until it is, inside the scope that was agreed. That is what the review window is for, and it is why you see a real page in week one rather than at the end.
If you need to stop, you pay for what has been done and you keep it. There is no clause that makes leaving expensive, because a client held in place by a contract is not a reference.
The genuine risk of hiring one person rather than an agency is cover. If I am ill, nobody else picks it up that week. An agency would, and that is part of what the extra few thousand pounds buys.
Twenty minutes, no charge, and you leave knowing what it would take and what it would cost, whether or not you go ahead.