Questions, Answered Plainly

Business is a five-page hand-coded website, £150 a month or £2,500 one-time. Growth adds SEO and more pages, £380 a month or £5,040 one-time. E-Commerce is an online store starting at £5,000 as a one-time build. The full breakdown is on the pricing page.

If you mainly need a professional site to send people to and to convert the visitors you already get, Business is the one. If you want the site itself to bring in new people by ranking for local searches, Growth adds the SEO work to do that. If you're selling products online, E-Commerce is the fit. If you're not sure, tell me what you're trying to achieve and I'll point you to the right plan.

Business gives you a five-page hand-coded site built to convert the people who already find you, through referrals, word of mouth or someone searching your name. It might rank for a keyword or two, but that isn't its job. Growth is what builds real ranking power: the extra pages let me cover your services in depth and target each location you serve, which is how Google comes to see you as a genuine authority for what you do and where you do it. Business gets you online properly; Growth is built to get you found across the searches that matter.

Monthly spreads the cost and bundles in hosting, edits, support and updates for one predictable fee, which protects cashflow. The one-time build is a single payment where the site becomes yours, with hosting and support available separately. Choose monthly to keep cash free and everything handled; choose one-time if you'd rather own the site outright.

E-Commerce starts at £5,000 as a one-time build, and once it's built it's yours. Hosting is available at £25 a month and unlimited edits and support at £75 a month if you want them, though neither is required. If you'd prefer to spread an online store over monthly payments, get in touch and I'll put together a custom quote.

Because I do the full build upfront with nothing to pay before work starts. The 12-month term covers the cost of that work, which is why there's no deposit and nothing to pay on day one beyond your first £150. After the first year it's month to month and you can stop any time. One-time builds have no minimum at all.

A website can mean very different things. A drag-and-drop builder gives you a page that exists. What I build is a hand-coded site designed to load fast, rank on Google and turn visitors into enquiries, then kept fast and supported over time. One is a digital business card. The other is a tool that brings in work.

Most cheap sites are built on page builders and themes that load heavy code whether you use it or not. A slow site loses visitors and ranks lower. I write the code by hand, so a site carries only what it needs. That's why mine score 90 or above on Google's PageSpeed Insights, where-as many builder sites sit at 40 to 60.

Because slow sites lose customers before they see your offer. Google's research found that 53% of mobile visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load, and that a one-second delay can cut conversions by up to 20% on mobile. Speed affects both how many people find you and how many act once they do. A fast site keeps the visitors a slow one loses.

It adds up quickly. With more than half of mobile visitors leaving after three seconds, and conversions falling with every extra second of load time, a slow site quietly loses enquiries every week. Independent studies put the drop at around 4.4% in conversions for each additional second between zero and five seconds. For a small business chasing every lead, that's real money.

A store does far more than a brochure site. It needs a custom Shopify theme, secure payment handling, product and inventory management, an order dashboard and the setup to run all of it reliably. That's more build, more moving parts and more that has to work perfectly when a customer pays you. The £5,000 starting price reflects a system that takes money and manages stock, not just pages that display information.

A few hundred pounds usually gets a default Shopify theme with your logo and products dropped in. That's a real, working store, and for some businesses it's genuinely all they need. The difference is the design. A default theme looks like thousands of other stores and isn't built around how you sell or what makes you stand out. What I build is a custom theme shaped around your products, your brand and your customers, set up to guide people to checkout rather than just list items. If a default theme does the job for you, take it. If you want a store that looks like yours and is built to convert, that's what you're paying for.

Because the structure of a page is part of what makes it rank and load fast, and small edits in the wrong place can quietly undo that. Headings, layout and code all work together, and a well-meaning change can break the SEO or slow the site down without it being obvious. So instead of handing you a builder to risk that, I make the changes for you, included and turned around within five working days. You get the changes you want without the chance of breaking what's working underneath.

WordPress relies on themes and plugins, which limit how a site can look and add code that slows it down. Each plugin is also a way in for hackers, which is why WordPress sites need constant security updates and still get breached. I build static, hand-coded sites instead. There's no login or database for an attacker to target, the design isn't boxed in by a theme, and the site loads faster because it only carries the code it needs. It's safer and quicker by design, not by constant patching.

It's the opposite of a problem, it's deliberate. Most websites get hacked through their login page or admin panel, so a static hand-coded site simply doesn't have one. There's nothing to brute-force, no database to break into and no admin area to exploit. When you need a change, you send it to me and it's done. Fewer doors means fewer ways in, which is part of why these sites stay secure.

Every site is responsive from 320px upwards, so it works on phones, tablets and desktops. Given most local searches now happen on a phone, that's where a lot of your customers will first see you.

SEO is the work that helps your site show up when someone searches for what you do. Most people never look past the first page of Google, so if you're not there, you're invisible to them. Good SEO puts you in front of people who are already looking to buy, which is the cheapest kind of customer to win.

Having a site means Google can find you; it doesn't mean you'll rank for much. A five-page site can pick up a keyword or two, usually your main one, but ranking broadly takes more than that. Google rewards sites that cover a topic in depth and show clear relevance to the areas they serve. That depth needs more pages than a small site has room for, which is exactly what the Growth plan is built around.

Two things that a small site can't. First, it builds topical authority: broad, in-depth pages across your services that tell Google you genuinely know your field, not just one corner of it. Second, it builds local relevance: a page for each location you serve, so you show up for searches in those areas, not only your home town. On top of that you get an SEO audit, competitor analysis, keyword research and Google Business Profile optimisation. The result is a site built to rank across many searches, not just one.

It's not instant. Google takes time to trust a site and move it up, so meaningful local ranking usually builds over a few months rather than days. The upside is that once you're ranking, it keeps bringing in enquiries without paying per click, unlike ads that stop the moment you stop spending.

No honest provider can guarantee a specific position, because Google decides rankings, not me. What I can do is build the site and the SEO properly so you've got the best possible shot at ranking. Anyone promising a guaranteed number one spot is telling you what you want to hear, not how Google actually works.

Only on the monthly plans, which run for an initial 12-month term and then continue month to month, cancellable any time after that. One-time builds have no minimum term at all.

On a one-time build, yes, ownership transfers to you once it's paid for. On the monthly plans you own your domain and all your content, while the code and design are licensed to you for as long as you're a client. If owning the code outright matters to you, choose a one-time build.

After the 12-month term you can cancel any time, with the site coming offline at the end of that calendar month. You keep your domain and your own content. Because the monthly plan licenses the code rather than selling it, the site itself comes down when you leave. A one-time build avoids this, since you own it.

Yes. If you're not happy with the initial design and want to cancel before development starts, you can do that in writing and get a full refund of anything you've paid.

Sites carry a small "Website by Milton Keynes Web Designs" credit in the footer unless we agree otherwise in writing.

On the monthly plans, yes, at no extra cost. On a one-time build, hosting is available separately at £25 a month.

Yes, unlimited edits and support are available on a one-time build for £75 a month. On the monthly plans they're already included.

Text and image changes, colour adjustments, minor layout tweaks, updates to existing features, and bug fixes, all turned around within five working days of your request.

A website isn't a finish-and-forget thing. Browsers change, security needs keeping up, content goes out of date and small problems appear over time. A site left alone slowly gets slower, less secure and less effective. Ongoing support keeps it fast, current and working.

Two things: the completed website questionnaire covering your goals, content and the look you want, and your first payment. Work starts once both are in.

Yes. I'm a sole trader and I do the design, the code and the support myself, so you deal with me directly the whole way through.