WEBSITE RESCUE

Every business and organisation, however small, needs a web site. Just what each needs is completely different in every case.  A small rural corner shop has far simpler needs than, say, Tesco. Web service providers too range in size and capabilities. Tesco’s web design agency would have no interest in the corner shop.  Similarly the designer of a corner-shop website would not be the right choice for Tesco, they need a team of possibly hundreds with massive overheads and high fees.  Our prices reflect that, a small new-build projects might only cost a few hundred pounds,  you can minimise the cost if you are able to provide quality images (photos) and/or text and your needs are simple. We will advise but won’t pressure you into buying more than you need. 

We’ve been working with the Internet since the early 1990s, even before websites became possible with the “World Wide Web” we were involved with Email and long forgotten services like Archie, Gopher, WAIS, IRC, and Usenet.

Many smaller businesses are facing big cost increases, not just the headline items: food, gas and electricity but also finding staff.  Everyone is looking for cost savings across the board.  Website and email costs are no exception. The importance of having a website is well-understood but can be expensive or complicated to set up.  We aim to provide what you need affordably without any big “learning curve” or need to for you understand the underlying technologies.

What do you need?

A web site needs two underlying services:

• a domain name (ours is website-rescue.co.uk), that’s used as the address of the web site and for routing email like help@website-rescue.co.uk  Most cost less than £20 a year.
• a web host. That’s now usually “cloud based” a share of a massive computer system like those used by Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Google. The cheapest service can be as low as £50 p.a. but you get what you pay for, we usually charge more but for a very simple very small site we can even compete with that.

We can source both those services.  We provide domain names at “market price” i.e. the same as you’d pay elsewhere. Our hosting prices are customised to your needs – why pay £hundreds for features you don’t need?  The difference is that we help you find the best fit for your needs and then handle the technicalities of making everything work together.

The next task is to create a website.  That’s where things can get complicated and expensive.  The bottom line is that you need reliable advice, appropriate to your needs and budget. We’ve been in this  business for 3 decades and can bring that experience to bear on your task. You may be familiar with the phrase “speed, quality, price pick any two” the idea is that you can only attain two of these qualities if you are willing to cut corners. We find that difficult to accept, it may be true if we change it to fastest, best, cheapest but in the case of websites what is “the fastest”? fastest to create? Well if you need a website today you may need to pay a premium or accept a pretty simple one but more commonly you can wait a few days even for a basic site.  What is “the best”? That’s subjective, is the best the most informative, the easiest to use, the most visually attractive, or a web-designer’s wet-dream crammed with fancy gimmicks.  For a visitor to websites “the best” website is the one that delivers the information they need immediately, no button clicks, no scrolling – that might be as little as street address and opening times. What is “the cheapest“? One answer is “free” but as the saying goes, “the only thing that’s free is the cheese in the mousetrap”. The opposite of the cheapest is the most expensive and that’s sounds like something most of us want to avoid. Various “build your own” website packages are widely advertised but the seemingly low headline price fails to mention add-on features you will need and disregards the cost of your time learning the system and building the web site.

So what’s the ideal? To be pragmatic. Do the best possible within the time and budget available.  We will use our experience to guide your decisions based on your needs and ideas.

Larger or complex websites

We specialise in maintenance and small tasks but we do take on one or two larger projects a year.  For an idea what we mean by larger projects think in terms of A4 pages of content, mixed text and pictures.  Over 15 pages is a larger project,  over 50 pages let’s discuss your  project, once we understand what you have in mind we may take the task on or we may suggest you look elsewhere.  Complex projects are those that may be only a few pages but require advanced bespoke programming, many designers lack coding skills, those that do have the requisite knowlege tend to be costly. We have toolsets and skills and depending on the detail of the requirement we may be able to help .

Our aims remain the same: to do the best possible within the time and budget available, providing value for money. Reference sites can be provided on request and see the Case Studies page for some examples.