Frequently asked questions
Quotes & Communication
Ideally the following information is available:
1. Mockups for the pages that should be developed. If not available, examples of other sites would be a good starting point.
2. The current website address.
3. The time span in which the site should be developed.
4. The hosting company or domain company at which your domain or webspace is located.
5. Also, include if there is a preference for a certain Content management system.
It starts by sending all the information for a quote to me. Then I will review the details and try to clarify as much as possible by asking questions about expected functionality and UX/UI requirements. Afterwards I will send you a detailed quote, which is the foundation of the contract.
After contractual agreement, the information and asset gathering starts. In this phase I collect: fonts, logos, graphic, mockups, text, images from the designer or the client. In the case that text or images are not available in the mockups, I will use the provided placeholders for developing the necessary pages. It’s up to the client then to replace it with the actual text. I will only input information once.
When I have all the information or most of it, I will start with programming the independent parts of the site in a component style. This helps me to re-use elements and optimise the process. While programming I insert the given text, as mentioned above. If the text later is altered in comparison with the original provided in the mockups, some design changes might be required. Think about text that looks too long, not fitting in predesigned boxes or shapes. Design changes lead to programming changes, and are therefore by definition considered to be changes to the offer, and thereby adding additional costs to the project.
After finalising the programming part, a feedback round is started and every page and functionality gets thoroughly reviewed. This usually results in minor changes or general fixes by missing details. When this phase is over, the new website is can set online and the contract is finished.
A minimum price of around 500 EUR applies for a 3 page website – this features a homepage, about page and a contact page. The layout for a site like that is simple, and it will also feature very limited design. A bit more advanced site, easily starts for 1250 EUR.
The offer will be provided within 2 working days, given that all information is available. Building a website can take from a week to 6 months. It totally depends on the required design and functionality.
Generally, I only work with trusted clients on an hourly base. There are exceptions, if there is uncertainty about the amount of work and scope of work, then we can work out of way to do an hourly contract.
All communication goes through E-Mail or Conference calls. On longer term projects, or more complicated matters, Slack is preferred. A new slack team communication group can be created or I can simply get an invite to the current Slack team chat.
E-Commerce
Woocommerce is a very user friendly system, it’s relatively lightweight compared to bigger e-commerce systems, while offering the same functionality. It also be extended easily, through open source as well as premium extensions. There are many stable and successful online shops with Woocommerce that have 10.000+ products and a lot of sales.
There is not a definitive answer to this. Implementing a shop, product detail page and a cart plus checkout that has been designed thoroughly, can be extremely time consuming. Standard designed e-Commerce sites are way simpler, but still some extensions to the functionality of the site can make the whole thing a lot more expensive.
This depends on the complexity, mostly it will take a minimum of a month. There are a lot of factors to take into account, because the setup of payment methods and shipping methods or other integrations can be causing delays.
Generally, e-Commerce requires more maintenance than normal sites because of the importance of security. Generally, due to its nature, e-Commerce sites are more sensitive to malfunctioning, because of all the moving parts. Staying ahead of maintenance avoids potential and unexpected disruptions.
Not necessarily. Plugins are generally feature extensions of Woocommerce, if a relatively simple shop is required, there is also no need for many plugins. In other more advanced shops, having a lot of plugins is a choice. It is also possible to get features programmed.
There are many cases that this is possible. Your CRM usually has information about this and otherwise there might be an extension that allows this integration.
E-Commerce sites are usually slow because they are not optimised, run outdated plugins, and run on inefficient hosting. It’s important that the hosting has a specific environment or space for Woocommerce sites.
Woocommerce on its own is pretty secure. There are ways to enhance this by enabling brute force password protection, setting proper user levels, updating plugins and themes regularly, choosing a good hosting company, using well maintained plugins and more advanced solutions.
Ofcourse, I have a lot of experience hosting e-Commerce websites and there is a great variety of options available. We can discuss what fits your needs the best, dependent on the required capacity ( traffic, sales and products ) and your budget.
Websites
There are several Content Management Systems I recommend. It depends on the requirements of the project. Not every content creator ( read client or content management ) wants to work with a complicated CMS, and some people are just used to one way of working. WordPress can be really scalable, and people can be very happy in using it, but sometimes it adds a lot of unused overhead ( think about maintenance ). In other cases, when quick landing pages need to be developed by the marketing team, WordPress can be very handy, because it can handle all the heavy lifting without requiring a lot of development support. So, there are ups and downs for every CMS, and in our discussion we can figure out what delivers the most long term value for your vision.
Headless CMS means that the frontend and backend are separated. WordPress usually runs as a frontend and backend on the same architecture, thereby it is usually a normal CMS. It can also be used as a headless CMS, when WordPress only acts as backend API and sends data to the frontend to generate a static site. More information about this is in the next question.
For really fast websites, I can highly recommend JAMStack websites. These are technologies that enable SSG ( static site generation ), which basically generate your site statically which improves Pagespeed because it won’t need a lot of the heavy lifting that comes from monolith websites. Monolith means, that backend and frontend run on the same architecture. Static sites only need a minimal environment to run.
Generally, I build sites with NextJS/NuxtJS or Gatsby, which are JAMStack sites. So yes, I can build really fast websites.
Dependent on the technology and hosting setup that was used for your website, I can help with optimisations. Outdated technology for example, requires extensive updating and potential refactoring (redoing) of existing programming effort. It is important to understand that this involves enormous effort and time.
If after, initial review, the technology and hosting setup allows for optimisations, I can help to upgrade your google pagespeed score to a good level.
A template can help save costs for programming a website. It can also add additional costs if the template is complicated, not documented properly, poorly maintained and outdated. Every template is different, but from my experience there are a few that can be used to save costs. We can evaluate what template works for your needs.