Frequently Asked Questions

As part of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), your website needs to have a privacy policy that tells users how data is collected, stored and used. Because not every business collects and handles data in the same way, each business is responsible for ensuring their own compliance, just as they are responsible for compliance with the laws that apply to them today.

You can find our Privacy Policy here and we used GetTerms to create it, using their Comprehensive policy. You can use it too, but we are not in any way endorsing this site, so please use it at your discretion. 

These are websites with ‘https’ or a ‘lock’ in the web address bar, that allows data to be sent over an encrypted connection. If your website has an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate, you’re making steps towards GDPR compliance. 

An SSL certificate is a digital certificate that authenticates the identity of a website and encrypts information sent to the server using SSL technology. Encryption is the process of scrambling data into an undecipherable format that can only be returned to a readable format with the proper decryption key. A certificate serves as an electronic ‘passport’ that establishes an online entity's credentials when doing business online. When a visitor attempts to send confidential information to a web server, the user's browser accesses the server's digital certificate and establishes a secure connection.

While having an SSL certificate is not an essential requirement, you will be making yourself more GDPR compliant if you implement one.

If you're interested in adding an SSL certificate to your existing website, get in touch and we can purchase and implement this for you for £34.99.

If you decide to use our web design services, we'll ask you to sign our terms and conditions. This often leads to questions about intellectual property, who owns what, and how this affects you. Other web design companies may handle this in different ways, but our agreement works as follows.

Who owns the intellectual property?
In terms of the site code, we remain the author and owner of intellectual property. This is not the same as owning your website, and we don't take any ownership of any design, content or ideas that you provide.

What we own is the specific lines of code that we've written to apply your requirements, and any designs we've produced. There is a simple reason for this. When we develop a new website, we'll probably use small elements of code that we've used in previous projects. For example, if we've already developed a contact form or some similar small feature, we're going to use and adapt that code rather than starting from scratch. It saves our time and your money. If we give you ownership of our code, we can't do this.

The way we write and organise our code is in a sense the main asset of our company, and if we gave up intellectual property for every project neither you nor we would benefit from that cumulative experience.

It's also worth knowing that by law all code, design and similar services are owned by the author. This is protected in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, so even if it's not mentioned in a contract or you haven't agreed any terms, your designer or developer still owns intellectual property by default.

How does this affect me?
It's important for us to own our code, but we don't believe this restricts you. You can still change to a new supplier to maintain your website in the future. You can still adapt and change the website yourself. And because we use web standards and open source technology, it's relatively easy for anyone with the right skills to maintain your website. In other words, you are not giving up control of your website or your independence from us.

What you can't do is make copies of your website, or sell part or all of our code to someone else. For example, you wouldn't be able to buy one website from us and then make 10 copies without paying us. There is no restriction on your ability to sell the original website to someone else, for example when transferring business ownership.

The legalese version of this is an 'irrevocable and perpetual' licence to use the code we provide, something which gives you freedom to change suppliers, update your website or transfer ownership while maintaining our IP rights.

What if i want to own the intellectual property?
If you wish to move the completed web designs, images, pages, code and source files created by us, or any other intellectual properties belonging to us to a different hosting provider, we offer you the chance to purchase these rights. The fee for this is equal to 50% of the total website build cost. Unfortunately, if you choose not to agree to pay this fee, you'd have to use someone else.

We can't compromise on the principle of owning our code, and you're unlikely to find anyone who will unless you employ a developer directly. However, as explained you don't need to own the intellectual property to maintain your control and independence.

In terms of Google ranking, we do on-site optimisation which includes adding in keywords and description for Google, as well as linking it to a google analytics account and also submitting the sitemap for indexing through google webmaster tools.

Most of this takes some time to take affect, but it will start to move up the rankings from these things we do. You can help improve the site’s ranking by spreading the word on social media and pushing people to it, but you can also set up a google business page here: https://www.google.com/business/, which acts as a kind of shop front in a search. You could also look at setting up a google Adwords account which helps to boost rankings with paid ads.

• the hosting of your website files
• a complete backup of files and the database every two days
• supply of a secure service
• domain management and email hosting (if this is being supplied by us)