Questions people ask before they commit

Your enquiry goes straight to the person who would do the work. If you have given us the address of an existing site, we will look at it properly before replying — speed, security, structure and how it reads on a phone.

You will get a considered reply within one working day, usually the same day: what we would suggest, roughly what it would cost and how long it would take. If a conversation would be more useful than an email, we will propose a short call or a meeting.

There is no charge for any of that, and no obligation. Nothing starts until you have a written proposal with the scope, timescale and fixed price set out and you are happy with all three.

No. We are based near Farnham and a good proportion of our clients are within an hour's drive — Farnham, Alton, Guildford, Godalming, Basingstoke, Aldershot, Farnborough, Petersfield and the surrounding towns — but we work with businesses across the UK.

Being nearby is genuinely useful at the start of a project, because it is much quicker to understand a business over a cup of tea than over email, and we will happily come to you. After that, most of the work happens remotely regardless of where you are.

If you are further afield and would rather meet, a video call at the outset achieves most of the same thing.

Often, yes — and we will tell you honestly which is the better value.

If the underlying site is well built, on supported software and reasonably quick, a redesign of the front end plus a content overhaul is usually the cheaper and lower-risk route. We keep what works, including any search rankings the existing URLs have earned.

Where a site is on an abandoned page builder, an unsupported platform or a theme that has not been updated in years, a redesign is putting a new coat of paint on something that cannot be kept secure. In that case we will explain exactly why, with the evidence, rather than simply pushing a rebuild.

A rebuild is usually justified by one of five things: the site is slow on a phone and cannot easily be made faster, it runs on software that can no longer be kept secure, you cannot edit it without paying somebody, it does not work properly on mobile, or it no longer describes what the business actually does.

If none of those apply, the honest answer is often that better copy, clearer calls to action and a handful of fixes will do more for your enquiry rate than a rebuild — for a fraction of the cost.

Send us the address and we will tell you which category you are in. We are perfectly happy to talk you out of spending money.

Yes. Pages, articles, FAQs, images and service descriptions are all editable through a web-based editor. You sign in, make the change, and press save; the site republishes automatically a minute or two later.

There is no licence fee for it, and no per-editor charge. Every change is recorded with who made it and when, so anything can be reverted.

We walk you through it before launch — twenty minutes is usually enough — and leave you written notes. If you would rather not touch it at all, changes are included in the allowance on any managed or maintenance plan.

We build with Next.js and store content as Markdown in your own Git repository, with a friendly editor on top. Pages are generated as static HTML and served from a global network, which is why they load quickly and cost almost nothing to host.

It is not WordPress. There is no database to be breached, no public login form to attack and no plugin ecosystem to patch every fortnight — which removes most of the reasons small business websites get hacked or go stale.

If you specifically need WordPress, perhaps because of an existing plugin or an in-house team who know it, we will tell you plainly that we are not the right studio and point you towards someone who is.

Yes, and we design for the phone first rather than shrinking a desktop layout afterwards. Most visitors to a local business website arrive on a phone, frequently outdoors and in a hurry, so that is the case we design for.

In practice that means readable text without pinching, tap targets big enough to hit accurately, a layout that holds together from 320 pixels upwards, forms that bring up the right keyboard, and a telephone number that dials when tapped.

Every site is tested on real devices before launch — not just resized in a desktop browser — including an older Android handset, because that is what a lot of people are actually using.

Either. The most common and most economical arrangement is that you supply a rough first draft — you know your customers and your trade better than we ever will — and we shape, structure and tighten it so it reads well and answers the questions people actually ask.

If you would rather hand it over entirely, we quote copywriting separately per page. That involves a longer conversation up front, because good copy comes from understanding how you talk about the work rather than from guessing.

What we will not do is fill pages with generic filler about passion and excellence. Vague copy is the main reason business websites fail to convert.

For most of the businesses we work with, a professionally designed and built website falls between £2,500 and £7,500. A focused five to eight page site for a local business or trade usually sits at the lower end; a larger site for a professional practice with detailed service pages, an article library and integrations sits higher.

We quote a single fixed price once the scope is agreed in writing, so the figure you see is the figure you pay. If the brief changes during the project we discuss it and re-quote before doing the work — you will never receive an invoice you were not expecting.

If your budget is below that range, say so. Sometimes the right answer is a smaller site now and a second phase later, and we would rather build something good within your means than stretch you into something you cannot afford.

A focused business website is typically designed, built and launched in three to four weeks from the point the scope is agreed. Larger sites with many service pages, location pages or integrations take six to ten weeks.

The single biggest variable is content. Projects that run late almost always do so because the words and photographs were not ready, not because of the build. We plan for that: we help shape the copy while the build progresses, and we tell you early exactly what we need from you and when.

If you have a hard deadline — a trade show, a rebrand, a lease ending — tell us at the outset. We will either commit to it or tell you honestly that it is not realistic.

The unavoidable one is your domain name, typically £10–£25 a year depending on the extension.

Hosting for a site built the way we build them usually costs nothing, because a statically generated business site sits comfortably within the free tier of the platforms we use. If your site ever outgrows that, the next step up is modest and we will tell you before it happens.

Beyond that it is optional. A managed plan or maintenance plan covers updates, backups, monitoring and a monthly allowance of changes for a fixed fee. Plenty of clients take one; some prefer to look after the site themselves, which is entirely possible.

For a typical project we invoice 40% on acceptance of the proposal, 30% when the design is signed off, and 30% on launch. Larger projects are staged over a few more milestones so neither side is ever far out of pocket.

Invoices are payable within 14 days by bank transfer. We are happy to work to a purchase order process if your business needs one.

Monthly plans are invoiced at the start of each month and can be cancelled with a month's notice. There are no set-up fees, exit fees or minimum terms.

A managed website is one where we take responsibility for keeping it working, for a fixed monthly fee. That covers hosting, domains, certificates, backups, software updates, security patching, uptime monitoring and an allowance of content and design changes each month.

The point is accountability. Most websites deteriorate because nobody in particular is responsible for them: certificates expire, software falls behind, forms quietly stop delivering enquiries, and content drifts out of date. On a managed plan those are our problem rather than yours, and you have a named person to ring.

There is no minimum term. Plans run month to month with a month's notice on either side.

Content edits, new pages, image changes, updated prices or service descriptions, seasonal opening hours, new team members, testimonials, small design adjustments and form changes.

Anything substantially larger — a new section of the site, a booking system, an integration, a redesign — is quoted separately, so you always agree the cost before work starts.

The allowance is deliberately generous because we would rather your site kept improving than sat frozen while you weighed up whether a fifteen-minute job was worth an invoice. Hesitating over small changes is exactly how websites go stale.

Sometimes. It depends on what it is built on and whether it can be kept secure and reasonably fast at a sensible cost.

We start with an audit covering hosting, software versions, security headers, backups, forms, performance, accessibility and search health, and give you the findings in plain English with the risks ranked. Most sites turn out to be fundamentally sound, which saves you the cost of a rebuild you do not need.

Occasionally the honest answer is no — usually an abandoned page builder or unsupported platform software. We will explain exactly why rather than take a monthly fee for maintaining something we know to be fragile.

Mostly by removing the things that get attacked. The sites we build have no database, no public login form, no plugin ecosystem and nothing executing code when a page is requested, so the great majority of automated attacks have nothing to aim at.

On top of that we configure the protections browsers already offer — HTTPS with HSTS, a content security policy, frame and content-type protections, a restrictive permissions policy — and we harden the contact form with server-side validation, rate limiting and invisible bot protection.

Every credential lives in an environment variable, never in the code. On managed plans, dependencies are patched monthly, backups are tested rather than assumed, and uptime and certificates are monitored continuously. There is more detail on our website security page.

We build with data protection in mind and give you the pieces you need, but compliance is ultimately about how your business handles data rather than about the website alone.

What we provide: a contact form that collects only what is needed to reply, an explicit consent checkbox with a plain-English explanation, a link to your privacy policy at the point of collection, no analytics or tracking by default, a consent management platform for cookies where any are used, and a drafted privacy and cookie policy tailored to how the site actually works.

What remains yours: keeping enquiry data only as long as you need it, responding to subject access requests, and having a lawful basis for any marketing. We are happy to talk it through, though we are not lawyers and would not pretend otherwise.

Yes. We build to WCAG 2.2 AA as standard, not as a paid extra: tested colour contrast, a visible focus indicator on every interactive element, semantic HTML with a correct heading structure, keyboard operability throughout, forms with proper labels and accessible error messages, and support for the operating system's reduced-motion setting.

Every site is tested with a keyboard alone and with a screen reader before it goes live, as well as with automated tooling.

Beyond being the decent thing to do, it is commercially sensible — around one in five people in the UK has a disability, and the same decisions make the site easier for everybody. Our accessibility statement sets out what we commit to on our own site.

Yes, entirely. On final payment you own the design, the code, the content and the domain. The hosting account and the code repository are set up in your name with you as the owner, and we work inside them.

That means if you ever want to move to another supplier, you revoke our access and everything stays exactly where it is. Nothing has to be exported, rebuilt or bought back. You also receive written handover documentation covering how the site is deployed, where the environment variables live and how the content model works.

We would much rather you stayed because the service is good than because leaving would be painful.

The person who designs and builds your site. Whitespace Digital is a small studio by choice, so there is no account manager relaying messages, no ticket queue and no offshore team you never speak to.

That has a practical benefit beyond being pleasant: the person who answers the telephone in two years' time already knows how your site is put together and why it was built that way.

It also sets a limit on how much work we take on at once. If we are genuinely too busy to do your project justice, we will tell you when we could start rather than accept it and let it drift.

Because a published email address is harvested within days and then buried under automated spam, which makes it worse than useless for both of us — genuine enquiries get lost in it.

The enquiry form reaches us instantly, asks a few questions that let us give you a useful answer straight away, and gets a reply within one working day. If you would rather talk, the telephone number is 01420 446331 and it is answered by a person.

Once we are in conversation you will of course have a direct email address for whoever is working on your project.