Terms of business

1. What we sell

SEO audit, £450

A written report on how findable your business is in search. It covers how you rank, whether AI assistants can cite you, how fast the site is, and what gets in the way of an enquiry. Delivered as a prioritised roadmap within five working days of payment.

Website build, from £3,500

A static, high performance website bounded by the specification agreed at discovery. The base fee covers up to six page designs. A design is either a one-off page or a reusable template. On top of that you get written copy for up to ten pages. One template covers as many pages of that type as you like, so a site can run to more than ten pages on six designs. Everything is built for speed on a phone, for search, and with Schema.org data. Research and copywriting are included, not quoted separately.

Ongoing search, from £400 a month

Monthly search work on any website. It starts at £400 a month on a site we built, and at £550 a month on a site we did not, which reflects working inside somebody else's platform. What sets the figure above that is the number of locations, the number of services needing their own pages, how much content you want each month, and how competitive the terms are. The quote fixes your monthly allowance in writing before anything starts.

On a site we did not build, the £450 audit comes first. It has to show that the platform, its theme and its extensions are current or can be updated, that there are no known critical security problems, that HTTPS is valid, that you hold admin access and own the domain, and that working backups exist before we change anything. If any of those fail we decline the monthly work and say what would have to change first.

On a site we did not build we work through your editor only. We publish content and edit page titles and descriptions. We do not touch plugins, themes, code or hosting, and we do not take responsibility for problems that were there before we started. The monthly report says what was done and what was blocked.

We recommend the audit before a build, because it is what tells us what to build. It is not a condition of one. You can buy the audit alone, or commission a build without an audit if you already know that is what you want.

2. The audit fee comes off the build

Order a new website within 30 calendar days of your audit report. If you do, the full £450 audit fee comes off the price of that build.

The audit stands on its own regardless: it is a complete piece of work whether or not you go further. The credit is an incentive to act on it while the findings are current, not a discount you lose something by declining.

3. You own it

Once the invoices are paid, it is all yours. That means the approved code, the copy we wrote, and the design assets made for your project.

There is no platform lock-in. Sites are built on standard, open web technologies and can be hosted anywhere by anyone. If you leave, you leave with a working website, not a licence to one.

4. 30 day defect warranty

Every build carries a 30 day warranty from launch. Any functional bug, broken link or display fault that departs from the agreed specification is fixed at no charge within that period.

This covers defects, not changes of mind. New requirements after launch are new work and are quoted as such.

5. Cancelling the monthly work

Ongoing search runs for a three month minimum, then rolling monthly. Either side may end it with 30 days written notice. Notice can be given at any time, including inside the first three months, but it cannot end the agreement before the end of month three.

The minimum exists because search work is cumulative. Content published in month one is what there is to measure in month three, and less time than that produces an invoice without an answer.

6. Looking after the site once it is live

Every build comes with the option of a care plan at £75 a month. It covers hosting on an account we manage, software and security updates, uptime monitoring, backups, and up to an hour a month of content fixes and basic changes, meaning edits to text, images and details on pages that already exist. Unused time does not roll over. New pages and new features are quoted separately.

The care plan is optional on every build. Without one, you host the site and handle updates yourself once the 30 day warranty ends. Your domain stays in your name either way, and leaving takes 30 days notice and a full handover of the code and the hosting.

7. Invoicing and payment

All fees are quoted and invoiced in pounds sterling.

• SEO audits: invoiced in full in advance. Work starts on payment.
• Website builds: 50% on commissioning and 50% when you sign off the staging site, before launch.
• Ongoing search: invoiced monthly in advance on 14 day payment terms.

8. What we do not promise

We do not guarantee search positions, traffic figures or enquiry volumes. Those depend on your competitors, your market, and on search engines that change without notice. Any supplier guaranteeing rankings is either misleading you or defining success so narrowly that it means nothing.

What we do promise is the deliverables described above, produced to the stated standard, led throughout by the senior lead who quoted them.

9. Governing law

These terms, and any dispute arising out of or in connection with them, are governed by the laws of England and Wales.