Forest Row, East Sussex
Most of us have had the other kind, the one you hope nobody clicks on. This is the opposite, and it is four hundred pounds rather than four thousand. You do not need to know what you want yet, or what half the words mean, because working that out is my job. I am Morgan, and I will explain every step of it in plain English.
Where I am
That is not a marketing line, it is just the situation. I am a director of Forest Row Energy Co-operative, a co-founder of HerMove over in East Grinstead, and I work on Hello Village, the what is on board for the village. A fair amount of that is unpaid, and none of it is on a rate card.
The paid work sits in the same few miles. Agile Landscapes and Ziggy’s Pet Supplies here in Forest Row, Thwaites Plastering in East Grinstead, Chandler’s Vet Physio and Heath Construction across East Sussex, Nine Yards Detailing in West Sussex, and Tori Cadogan, Long Acres and ARTBARS elsewhere in Sussex.
If you are local, you can come and find me. That is worth more than a logo on a website, and it is the reason I will not write you something I cannot stand behind in the Co-op queue.
01 / What you actually get
All of that.
£400
then £100 a year, which covers your hosting and your domain
If you need to sell online it is £500, with the products, checkout and delivery set up and tested. Those are the whole costs. Nothing gets added later unless you ask me for something extra, and I will tell you the price before I do it.
02 / Why it is not three thousand
A website like this is usually quoted somewhere between £2,000 and £5,000, and you wait about six weeks for it. That is not a rip off. It is what it costs to run an agency.
When you pay that, a good part of it never reaches your website. It pays for an office, a sales person, an account manager to sit between you and the work, and often a designer who is not the person you spoke to in the first place.
Here there is one person with low overheads who has built this enough times to be quick at it. That is the entire trick. Nothing is being held back from you at £400, and there is nothing extra waiting to be charged later.
Wix, Squarespace and Shopify prices, compared over five years
03 / Which one you need
£400plus £100 a year
Built from nothing, so there is no platform telling you what you cannot do and no subscription waiting for you. The one I would pick.
£500plus £100 a year
The same build with a shop in it. No monthly platform fee and no cut of your sales, and the first twenty products written for search.
04 / Explained properly, no jargon
The first one you have heard of. SEO means showing up on Google when somebody searches for what you do. That still matters, and it is still where most people find a business.
The second one is newer and nobody has explained it to you yet, so here it is. More and more people now ask ChatGPT or Gemini instead of searching. When they do, the assistant does not show a list of ten. It names two or three businesses. Being one of those is a different piece of work, and it has a clumsy name: GEO, or Generative Engine Optimisation.
The practical difference is that assistants need your information laid out in a way they can read and quote. Most small business websites have none of that, which is the good news. It is still cheap to be one of the few that does, and both builds include it as standard.
05 / Work
Seven sites I have built, each one on a desktop, an iPad and a phone. These are the real sites, not mock-ups, so open any of them on whatever you are reading this on.
Rebuilt it from scratch, with a page for each part of the workshop, a shop that knows how many of each item are in stock, and an admin the team use themselves. Every old address still lands on the right page.
28 addresses carried over from the old site, none lost
Four currencies pounds, euros, US and Hong Kong dollars
14 posts recovered after two earlier moves lost them
Reassure first then ask for the booking
Monthly so it does not stand still
Director as well as the person who builds it
12 towns each with a page of its own
06 / How it works
It asks what you do, who buys from you and what you want the site to achieve. There are no trick questions and nothing is compulsory except your name and email. If you do not know an answer, leave it, we can work it out together.
One number, what is included, what is not, and the date it would go live. No call before that point, because you should be able to decide in your own time without someone on the phone. If I am not the right fit I will say so and point you somewhere better.
You get a link part way through so there are no surprises at the end. One round of changes is included and written into the quote, so you never have to worry that asking for a tweak will cost you.
I submit it to Google and Bing, set up your Google Business Profile and check the AI assistants can read it. Then I show you how to change things yourself, if you want to.
None of this quite you
Everything on this page assumes you roughly know what you are after. Plenty of people do not, and that is not something you have got wrong. It is the normal starting point.
Maybe you have a website and something about it is not working, and you could not say what. Maybe what you need is not a website at all and nobody has told you that yet. Maybe you have been let down by someone before and would rather speak to a person than fill in a box.
Any of those is a good reason to ring me instead. There is no charge for a conversation, nothing to sit through, and no follow up if you decide against it. Tell me what you are actually trying to do and I will tell you honestly whether I can help. If I cannot, I will usually know who can.
07 / Or on a platform
Both of these cost more to run than the builds above, because somebody else is hosting them and charging you for it. That is a fair trade if you want to move things around yourself, and a waste if you do not. I will tell you which you are.
£450 plus £130 a year to Wix
If you want to restructure pages yourself with a drag and drop editor, this is the one. It takes longer to build and the yearly fee is Wix’s, not mine.
£500 plus Shopify’s monthly plan
For shops that need the big machinery: thousands of products, supplier feeds, subscriptions, multi country tax. Worth the monthly fee at that size.
08 / Afterwards
All three are optional and none of them ties you in. Plenty of people take nothing at all, and that is completely fine. Here is what each one does so you can decide.
£150a month
The quiet one. It stays online, stays safe, and small changes get done without you chasing.
£350a month
What most people end up on. Everything in Care, plus the steady work that actually moves you up Google.
£650a month
For when the website is how you get most of your work and you want to push it harder.
09 / Questions
Not at all, and most people say the same thing. Working out what you need is the job I am being paid to do. Tell me what your business does and what is frustrating you at the moment, and I will tell you what I think would help, including if the answer is that you do not need a new website yet.
A custom website is £400 and a custom shop is £500, both then £100 a year which covers hosting and your domain. On Wix it is £450 and £130 a year paid to Wix. On Shopify it is £500 plus their monthly plan. That is the whole cost in every case. Nothing gets added later unless you ask for something extra, and I will always tell you the price first.
Most people want the £400 custom website: it is the cheapest, the fastest to get live and the cheapest to run. Take Wix at £450 instead only if you want to rearrange pages yourself with an editor. For selling, the £500 custom shop unless you have thousands of products or complex tax, in which case Shopify. Say what you do and I will tell you, including if the answer is that you do not need any of them yet.
Probably, but you do not need to buy it separately. It is included in every build, so nobody is going to come back to you afterwards with an extra bill for it. If somebody has quoted you for SEO on top of a website, it is fair to ask them what the website included.
More and more people ask ChatGPT or Gemini for a recommendation instead of searching Google. When they do, the assistant names two or three businesses rather than listing ten. Getting your information laid out so assistants can read and quote it is a small piece of extra work, it is included, and very few small businesses have done it yet.
No. The retainers are optional and none of them ties you in. Plenty of clients take nothing and manage their own site perfectly well. What I will say honestly is that a site nobody touches gradually slips down Google while competitors who do touch theirs move up. Take one or do not, but now you know the trade.
Forty eight hours from the point the brief is complete. Your side is the form, which takes about fifteen minutes if you have your details to hand. That is the whole reason the form is long: the 48 hours works because nothing has to be chased afterwards.
No. I am in Forest Row in East Sussex and I know this area well, which helps if you want local customers. The work happens remotely and I build for people all over the country. If you would rather sit down together, I can come to you within about an hour.
Me, the whole way through. Ferris Creative is one person, Morgan Loughton. You will not be passed to an account manager and nothing goes offshore. It is also why I only take a few builds at a time, so nobody gets rushed.
You see it part way through rather than at the end, so there are no nasty surprises. One round of changes is included and written into the quote. If it is genuinely not working, say so early and I would rather fix it than have you accept something you are not happy with.
Two fields are required and you are not committing to anything. Even if you are only half sure, send it. I would rather talk you out of something than sell you the wrong thing.