Questions are probably a good thing.

We’ll start by asking you some questions about your business, your customers, your branding, any images or other material you already have, and what you want your website to achieve.

Then we go away and build it. We may come back with another question or two if we discover something we need to know along the way.

When it’s ready, we’ll show you the finished website and ask you to go through it carefully. You can then give us a consolidated list of revisions, which can include reasonable changes to the design, content and pages. We’ll make those changes and get the site ready to publish.

Once it’s live, Website Care covers reasonable ongoing tweaks. Bigger structural changes, new pages or new functionality can still be added later and we’ll agree a price for those separately.

That depends on your business, so we’ll ask the questions rather than giving you a huge checklist to complete.

We’ll usually want to understand what you do, who your customers are, what you want visitors to do, and anything you already have such as a logo, branding, photographs, existing copy or an old website.

Don’t worry if you don’t have all of those things. Part of our job is working out what we actually need to build the right website for you.

A straightforward website could be ready for you to review in as little as a week. In practice, it depends on what we’re building, what else we’re working on, how quickly we can get everything we need from you and, occasionally, whether the developer has gone on holiday.

As a general rule, plan for up to around four weeks. It will usually be somewhere in between, and we’ll give you a realistic idea of timescale before we start.

Because we charge a fixed price for the standard website, we need to put a reasonable boundary around the amount of work included in that price.

Your first consolidated round of revisions is included before the website is published. That gives you the opportunity to review the whole site properly and ask us to make reasonable changes before it goes live.

You can have further revisions if you want them — they’re simply additional work and may be chargeable. Once the site is live, the smaller everyday tweaks covered by Website Care are included as normal.

That’s fine. Our standard package is designed to cover the needs of a typical brochure website, not to impose a limit on what we can build. If you need more pages, more content or something outside the standard package, take a look at our pricing or talk to us about what you need.

Absolutely. If you need something beyond a standard website, we can design and develop bespoke functionality too. Custom development falls outside the standard ProperPage package, so we’ll discuss what you need and quote for it separately.

We deliberately don’t define this by counting every word or image. The basic test is how much work the change involves.

Changing or tweaking an image, updating some copy, changing a price, adding another review, or adding or removing a section using the existing design would normally be a reasonable change.

If we need to start designing substantial new layouts, creating entire new pages or developing new functionality, that becomes additional work. We’ll tell you before we start and agree any cost with you.

Yes. You can transfer the domain to us to manage for you, or keep it with your existing registrar.

If you keep control of it, we may occasionally need you to make a change in your registrar account. We’ll tell you exactly what needs doing and talk you through it if necessary.

Yes. We’ll help you find a suitable available domain and can arrange the registration for you.

We’re not a domain registrar, so the exact cost depends on the domain and the registrar supplying it. Most ordinary domains are relatively inexpensive, while some extensions and particularly desirable domains can cost considerably more. We’ll tell you the cost before registering anything.

We’ll pass on the registration cost with a small management charge. Most importantly, it’s your domain. If you leave ProperPage, you can take it with you.

No. You’ve paid us to build your website, so you’re not locked into paying us forever to keep it.

If you choose to manage it yourself, however, responsibility for the website passes to you. That includes arranging and maintaining hosting, keeping software and infrastructure secure, monitoring the site and dealing with anything that stops working.

You’ll also need to look after services such as contact forms: making sure messages continue to be delivered, protecting the forms from spam and abuse, and making sure they can’t be misused to send unwanted email to other people.

Some ProperPage features rely on our own infrastructure and won’t work outside it, so those would need to be replaced with your own equivalent. Website Care means all of that remains our problem instead.

Yes. You’ve paid us to build your website, and you can ask us for a copy of the website code.

There is an important distinction between your website and the ProperPage services it uses. Things that run on our infrastructure — such as our contact-form handling — aren’t part of the portable website code and will stop working if the website is moved elsewhere.

If you take the website elsewhere, your new host or developer will therefore need to provide replacements for those services. Ongoing ProperPage support and Website Care apply to websites we host and manage.

We’d be sorry to see you go, but we don’t believe your website should be held hostage to keep you as a customer.

You can take the website code you paid us to build and host it yourself or give it to another developer.

ProperPage infrastructure and managed services don’t transfer with it, so anything that depends on those services will need an alternative before the site is moved. Once you leave Website Care, responsibility for hosting, maintenance, changes and support passes to you or your new provider.

We’re not planning on going anywhere.

But if ProperPage were ever to close, we would aim to give our customers sufficient notice and help them take ownership of their website code so that it could be moved to another provider. Building portable websites rather than locking them into a proprietary website platform makes that considerably easier.

We won’t promise that, and we’d be wary of anyone who does.

Search rankings are influenced by many factors, and search results are increasingly complex and personalised. We’ll build your website with a sensible technical foundation, but ongoing SEO and digital marketing are specialist services and aren’t something ProperPage currently sells.

If you choose to work with an SEO or marketing specialist, that’s fine. We can work with them and make reasonable changes to your website as part of Website Care.