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We write about the web the way we explain it to a client. Every story ends with what you can do yourself.
Your domain expires today, your site has 37 errors, somebody wants money for their photo. Every website owner gets this mail. Which of it is noise, which costs money and which can cost you access, what all of it has in common, and one rule that sorts the lot, our own messages included.
Your domain expires today, your site has 37 errors, somebody wants money for their photo. Every website owner gets this mail. Which of it is noise, which costs money and which can cost you access, what all of it has in common, and one rule that sorts the lot, our own messages included.
A customer writes that their browser showed a red screen instead of your site and called it dangerous. On your own computer everything looks fine. That is no accident: it is Google Safe Browsing, a list read by Chrome, Firefox and Safari. How sites end up on it, why the owner finds out last, how to check and get off the list, and what we check ourselves.
You type your web address from memory; you have never typed your own company name into Google. Your customer does, and does it last of all, just before calling. What meets them there: your site under a heading you did not choose, the state figures, a competitor advert, an old Facebook page. Who put each row there, what you can change, and how to run that search as a stranger.
You have surely been offered an AI receptionist, a chatbot or a missed-call text-back. The same technology is sold for a handful of euros a month by one seller and for several thousand by another. Five questions and three warning phrases that tell you which offer is real, without you needing to know anything about AI.
"Very happy, highly recommend!" - Mari K., satisfied customer. You did not invent it; Mari really said it, on the phone. But what reached the page does nothing any more, because there is nothing in it anybody could check. The four questions a testimonial has to answer, and the one shift in asking that changes everything.
There is a News item in the menu with three posts under it, the newest dated three years ago. A visitor reads the date before the headline, and the date asks a question the page never answers: is this company still there? This is not a Google penalty, it is a signal to a person. Three honest options for a dead news page, and a list of the dates that make promises on your site.
A reader came to your site with one question and left without an answer. Hiding the price does not filter by budget, it filters by patience. Four honest ways to put a number on the page when you have no price list, and one uncomfortable reason it usually does not happen.
The people your design quietly excluded are not the ones you picture. Seven checks you can run today, and one five-minute test that tells you more than the rest.
For a number of Estonian businesses that page genuinely works, and it is worth saying so honestly. Four things still go undone, and one of them decides the rest: you are renting the shop, and the door is not yours.
You nodded through a meeting about A records and TTL. The invoice says "unlimited", the report shows a red LCP. Here are those words back, in groups and a sentence apiece, every abbreviation written out. Including the three that actually cost money when they go wrong.
The site is live but nobody arrives from search. Seven causes in the order we actually find them, and five of them you can check yourself for free.
A customer asks an assistant and gets three names back. An honest look at what makes a machine name you, how to rewrite your own sentences, and what nobody should promise you.
The first screen says "Welcome to our website", and below it "Quality and reliability since 2011". One test you can run today: if a sentence stays true with a competitor's name in it, delete it.
A visitor will never write to tell you the site was slow. They just leave. Where the speed goes, what it costs you, and what you can fix today.
Three quotes for the same job, and the highest is four times the lowest. Usually nobody is cheating: three people read the request three different ways. What you pay for, and what to put in the enquiry.
Almost nobody can say where the photos on their website came from, and the person who could has long since moved on. The four ways a photo gets onto a site, and how to go through your own media library before anybody asks.
Somebody filled in your contact form. A name, a phone number, an email and one box where people write more than you asked for. Most owners can say where that message landed. Far fewer can say who else got a copy of it, and how long it stays.
Nothing happens to a website nobody touches, for a long time, and then everything happens at once. A walk through that time: what ages, what breaks quietly, and what your customer sees before you do.
The bar at the bottom of the page is not where consent happens. Seven mistakes we see on almost every site, and how to check for them yourself in ten minutes.
It is twenty to midnight and you are on the second page of the quote, the one that says what the number buys. Scope, prototype, staging, acceptance, change request. Here are those words in a sentence each, along with the ones a designer says beside a draft and the ones that arrive in the yearly domain letter. And the single word that costs the most.
Friday afternoon, a customer says your site is not working, and on your own computer it works fine. What you actually do in the next ten minutes: how to check, what the error message tells you, and which of the three doors to knock on.
A message filed as spam gives you no error, no notice and no bounce. The three settings that tell the receiving side a message is really yours, and the one contact form that sends your customers' mail under a stranger's name.
The domain, the hosting, the site itself and the accounts around it are four separate things, and they can have four separate owners. How to find out in half an hour whose hands your keys are in.
More visitors than last year, the same quiet inbox, and two expensive conclusions waiting at that fork. The enquiry is usually lost in the last thirty seconds of a visit, and almost everything broken in there is small and boring.
A local search puts a map and three businesses above everything else. Only below them do the ordinary results begin. How you get there, what actually moves it, and what nobody can promise you.
The new logo has been delivered, six months have gone by and nothing else has changed. A brand has five parts and the mark is the last of them: here are the other four, in the order in which they actually decide things.
The question comes round every year and the answer is usually two flag icons. First it is worth knowing who the second reader is, what machine translation does to a price page, and why half a second language is worse than one.
The quote was signed in spring, it is autumn now, and the site has been almost finished for four months. Four things actually hold a website project up, and none of them is the technical work. Three of the four sit with the client, and one chapter here is about our own mistakes.
An online shop is not a website with a basket on it. It is an operation, and the website is the cheapest part of it. Three honest options, the costs no quote contains, and the questions that separate a real quote from a cheap one.
Almost every site has statistics and almost nobody has a question. Which figure is empty, which one decides, why bounce rate does not mean what you think, and a ten minute routine that fits into a month.
The site was designed on a 27-inch screen and is read one-handed in a shop queue. Most of what is broken in there adds up to about an hour of work. One thing does not, and that difference is worth knowing.
The question arrives as "our site looks old". That is a symptom, not a diagnosis. Five questions you can answer yourself in ten minutes, and what a rebuild resets that a repair does not.
Try a shorter word or pick another topic.
Tell us about your site and what troubles you. We say honestly what it costs and whether you need it at all.
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