What is included in a business website, and what usually is not

What should always be included

These come with every package we build, at every price, and it is reasonable to expect them from anyone:

• A responsive design – the site works properly on a phone, not just on a laptop. Most of your visitors will be on a phone.
• Contact and enquiry forms – so people can reach you without opening their email client.
• Basic search engine setup – page titles, descriptions and a sitemap, so the site can actually be found.
• The first year of hosting, your domain and email – a site with nowhere to live is not finished.
• An allowance for small changes – from 30 minutes a month on the smallest plan up to two hours on the largest.

What is normally charged separately

None of these are hidden – they are published prices – but they are worth budgeting for rather than being surprised by:

• Booking and appointments, from EUR 450. A calendar that takes real bookings is a system, not a page.
• A second language, from EUR 350. Every page has to exist twice, and stay in step.
• Extra pages, from EUR 75 each beyond your package allowance.
• Branding, from EUR 300 for a kit or a redesign, if you do not already have a logo and colours to build from.

What is rarely included anywhere, and worth asking about

Content

Words and photographs are almost never included by anyone, and they are the most common cause of a delayed launch. Decide early whether you are writing them or paying someone to.

Ongoing hosting after year one

Ours is included for the first year and renews annually after that at the rate of the plan included with your package. Ask any supplier what happens in year two, because a build price that excludes hosting is not comparable to one that includes it.

Support when something breaks

Ask who fixes it, how quickly, and whether that costs extra. A cheap build with nobody behind it is not cheap the first time it goes down.

Questions worth asking before you sign

• Is this a fixed price, or an estimate that can move?
• What does year two cost, all in?
• Who owns the site and the domain if we part ways?
• What happens if I want a change after it goes live?
• How quickly does someone respond when something is wrong?

For what it is worth, our own answers: fixed price agreed in writing first; year two is the hosting plan included with your package; the domain is yours; changes within your monthly allowance are included and larger ones are quoted; and enquiries are answered within one working day.

One thing worth knowing about revisions

Changes during the design stage are expected and easy. Once a design has been finalised and agreed, later changes to it are quoted separately – so the review before sign-off is the moment to be fussy about spelling, images and layout, not after it is live.

What to do next

Compare the packages and what each includes, or read how much a website costs in Malta for the pricing in full.