What to ask a web designer before you hire them Most bad website experiences do not start with bad design. They start with the questions nobody asked at the start. You like the portfolio, you agree a price, and six months later you cannot log in to your own site, small edits cost a fortune, [...]
If you have ever looked in Google Search Console and seen a warning about "Core Web Vitals issues" without knowing what it actually means, you are not alone. Most small business owners have never heard the term until Google flags a problem, and by then it has usually been quietly affecting their rankings and [...]
Most homepages fail in the first five seconds. Not because they look bad, but because a visitor lands on them and cannot immediately answer three questions: what do you do, who do you help, and why should I trust you. If those questions are not answered fast, the visitor leaves and you never know [...]
Most business owners assume that more enquiries means more spending. A new website, a bigger ad budget, an SEO retainer. Sometimes that is true. But I have sat down with clients whose traffic was perfectly reasonable and whose enquiry rate was still poor, and in almost every case, the fix cost nothing. Getting more [...]
Every week I speak to a small business owner who built their own website on Wix or Squarespace, spent a weekend getting it live, and is now three years in wondering why it ranks nowhere, why the phone does not ring, and why a competitor with a plainer site is doing better business than them. [...]
Most small business websites sound the same. "We are passionate about delivering excellence." "Quality you can trust." "Your satisfaction is our priority." Read ten sites in the same sector and you will find variations of those phrases on almost all of them. They are meaningless, and every visitor knows it. Writing your own website [...]
Your website is not a one-off project. You do not build it, launch it, and leave it alone for three years while it silently deteriorates. That is exactly what most small business owners do, and it is exactly why so many of them end up dealing with hacked sites, broken pages, and a slow [...]
You have had a couple of quotes for a new website. One is £300. One is £2,500. The work looks similar on the surface. Both are five pages, both are WordPress, both come with a contact form. So you go with the cheaper one.I have watched this play out with dozens of clients over 17 [...]
There is a version of your website that looks fine on the surface but quietly bleeds customers every single day. I have seen it hundreds of times across 17 years of working with UK small businesses. The site is live, it has pages, it has your phone number on it somewhere. But it is not [...]
Businesses are filling their websites with AI-generated content that sounds like every other business in their industry, ranks for nothing, and convinces nobody to buy anything. Google updated its Quality Rater Guidelines in January 2025 specifically to target this kind of low-effort content. If your website copy could belong to any business in your [...]
