Those quick one- or two-sentence instructions are enough to get the job done because we already know your website and the business behind it: how the checkout is set up, where the delivery rules live, which decisions were made last time round and why. Nothing needs explaining from scratch, because there is nobody new to explain it to. You say what you want changed, and the next you hear of it is that it has been done.
Reading, Berkshire
Looking after your website
For our clients, a sentence or two is usually enough to get a job done: the price on the sale page needs updating; the new brochure needs to go up before Thursday; here's a photo for our Google Business page; I need a summary of last month's Analytics; can somebody look at why the contact form has stopped emailing us?
A quick call or an email is all you need: someone at the other end will take care of it, in the way a specialist employee would if you could justify employing one.
£54
An hour plus VAT. Less for work our assistant can do
5 min
The smallest unit we bill. Nothing rounded up to the hour
£0
Contracts, minimum charges and monthly fees
£12.92
Hosting a month plus VAT, the only thing that recurs
You only explain your business once
Part of the job is noticing
Some of the work you will never ask for, because we get to it first. When a software update breaks something, you hear about it from us rather than from a customer. When the hosting starts running short of room, it is dealt with before it matters. And when the job you have asked us to do won’t get the result you want, we say so before we do it, not after.
How much of this you want is up to you. Most clients agree roughly how much unrequested work they are happy for us to do in a month, so we can get on with it rather than stopping to ask each time.
What it covers
Things change, and your site has to keep up. New prices, new opening hours, a member of staff who has left, twenty new products that need photographs cropped and descriptions written. None of it is difficult and all of it takes somebody an afternoon they have not got.
Some of it is public-facing and only works if it happens regularly. Posts on whichever social accounts are worth keeping, a newsletter to the customers who asked for one, search listings for pages that would otherwise never be found, advertising if you run any, and a monthly set of figures with a note on what changed and why.
Some of it you would rather never think about at all. Software updates and the things they occasionally break, hosting and email, backups, security, software licences that expire at inconvenient moments, and the deliverability problem that starts the day a mail provider changes its rules.
And then there is the occasional bigger thing. A new business venture that requires a new section to your site, connecting your shop to a stock management system, a form that automatically channels enquiries to the right people, a redesign when the site has eventually started to show its age. Those get a date rather than being squeezed in, but it is the same people and the same arrangement.
Documentation and screencasts
For jobs that you do yourself, we provide written instructions with screen grabs and, when it’s more helpful, screencasts that walk you through a task step by step.
Documentation and screencasts come in especially handy for those jobs that only come round now and then. Nobody has trouble with the things they have to do week in, week out. It is the one that comes round each quarter, or once a year, that costs somebody an afternoon of trying to remember how it went last time. A short video removes that afternoon, and removes it again every year after that.
How it works
You get in touch however suits you. Phone, email, WhatsApp, whichever is least effort at the time. There is nothing to log in to and no form to fill in.
Small things usually just get done. Anything with a cost worth knowing about in advance, you hear an estimate first.
Phone calls and quick emails are not charged for. If you want to know whether something is possible, or roughly what it would take, or what happened to the thing you asked about last week, that is a conversation, and conversations are free. If an email turns into real work, writing a set of instructions for your staff for instance, that is work and it goes on the timesheet like anything else.
What you pay
Time is charged at £54 an hour plus VAT. Some work, like data entry, may be done by someone junior and you’ll be charged a lower rate.
You pay for the time a job actually takes. A five minute job costs five minutes and nothing is rounded up to the nearest half day or even the nearest hour. There is no contract to sign, no notice to give and no monthly fee for being on the books. If you need nothing for three months, you pay nothing for three months.
Invoices go out monthly or quarterly depending on how much work there has been, always in arrears and always with the timesheet attached, listing every job and the time it took, so you are never paying in advance for work that has not happened.
The one thing that recurs is hosting. Our business hosting package, which suits most small businesses, is £12.92 a month plus VAT, invoiced quarterly. Your domain names and any licences stay in your own name rather than ours. That is deliberate. We have known too many clients whose previous supplier held the domain and then disappeared, leaving them unable to access their own account.
What it is not
Much of what is sold as website maintenance is a care plan: a set number of requests each month, hours that expire if you do not use them, a faster lane for those on a bigger plan. That’s not what we do. There is no allowance to use up, so a quiet month wastes nothing and a busy one does not hit a ceiling. And the arrangement does not lapse. If we do not hear from you between one job and the next, you are still a client, and the next job is handled like the last.
Who it suits, and who it does not
It suits businesses whose website carries the trade: the shop that takes the orders, the site that brings in the enquiries, the booking page everything else depends on. If a day of downtime costs money, and there is nobody on the payroll whose job the website is, that is the gap this arrangement fills.
It does not suit everyone. If a website feels like an overhead rather than a way of getting business, this will feel expensive whatever it costs. And if your budget suits a build-your-own website platform, use one. They are good at what they are for, and we will still be here if you outgrow it.
One month, and twenty-five years
That is one month of looking after one client’s website, taken from the timesheet they were sent. It reads as a list of small things because the job is mostly small things, done promptly, for years on end. Done that way, it keeps clients: our longest have stayed for twenty-five years and counting, through every rebuild of their sites. Nobody stays with a supplier that long out of politeness.
One month, and twenty-five years
That is one month of looking after one client’s website, taken from the timesheet they were sent. It reads as a list of small things because the job is mostly small things, done promptly, for years on end.
Done that way, it keeps clients: our longest have stayed for twenty-five years and counting, through every rebuild of their sites. Nobody stays with a supplier that long out of politeness.
- 01/06
- updated pinned posts on Facebook
- 01/06
- restored Trustpilot ribbon on mobile version
- 01/06
- fixed search form on search results page
- 03/06
- removed irrelevant products from summer category
- 03/06
- moved advertising budget from Shopping to Pmax
- 04/06
- corrected Highlands & Islands delivery price as requested
- 05/06
- added drag and drop reordering to gallery module:
- 09/06
- deferred render-blocking scripts and styles
- 10/06
- fixed layout shift while filter is loading
- 11/06
- scheduled six customer review posts
- 12/06
- SEO and spelling/grammar check for new product page
- 17/06
- fixed date picker glitch on mobile
- 22/06
- new sliding tabs for small screens
- 25/06
- social media post for customer review
- 29/06
- monthly statistics report and analysis
- 30/06
- scheduled social media posts for four customer photos
June 2026, one client. Client name and figures removed.
The awkward questions
How quickly do you respond?
Small jobs, the ones that take an hour or two, are usually turned round within a day in office hours, so a job sent on Friday afternoon generally comes back on Monday. There is no ticket to raise and no queue to join.
Anything that runs to several days gets a date in the diary rather than being started straight away. That is deliberate. Work of that size done in stolen half hours between other people’s emergencies takes longer and comes out worse. You will know when it is scheduled for, and if the date does not suit you, say so and we will move it.
What if I need something big?
It is quoted like a project, because it is one. You will know the cost before anything starts, and the prices for builds and redesigns are published on our pricing page. What does not change is who does the work: the people who look after your website are the people who build the next version of it.
What about emergencies?
If something is actually broken, a shop that has stopped taking payments, email that has stopped arriving, a site that is down, it goes to the top of the pile and stays there until it is fixed.
Some of it we can fix ourselves. Some of it means getting hold of a host, a payment provider or whoever built the part that has failed. Either way you will hear from us while it is happening rather than afterwards, because the worst part of an outage is not knowing whether anybody is working on it.
What happens if you are not around?
What we know about your website is written down rather than carried around in somebody’s head, so someone in our team – or anyone else who’s qualified – will be able to pick up where the last person left off. If you’ve been through the experience of having one person who understood your site but then disappeared, we are not going to be the ones who do that to you again.
What if I want to leave?
Then you leave. There is no contract and no notice period, so leaving is a conversation rather than a negotiation. It does not happen often, and when it has, it has been amicable.
Who owns everything?
You do. The design, the code, the content and the data are yours once the bills are paid, and your domain names will have been in your own name from the start. If you left tomorrow, you would take everything with you and owe nothing but the last invoice.
Send us a sentence
You do not need a brief, and you do not need to know what the fix is called. The fault you have been working around for months, the job nobody has known how to do since somebody left, the change you keep meaning to get round to. Send the sentence, and we will tell you what it would take.