Web Design and Development FAQs

Web design is the process of creating websites, showing design options and providing a client with a design that fulfils their requirements. It includes several aspects, including webpage layout, content production, and graphic design. While the terms web design and web development are often used interchangeably, web design is technically a subset of the broader term web development.

It really depends on the complexity and size of the required website. A simple 5 page brochure style website might typically take around 8 weeks. (2 weeks on the initial design, 4 weeks to populate, source, write content and make modifications, 2 weeks to finalise the development and migrate the site live).

Larger, more complex sites including eCommerce and additional functionaility could take anything between 2 months and a year.

With most of our clients we’re able to provide timing estimates once we’ve accessed the requirements and provided an initial quotation. 

We’re flexible when it comes to showing a working website design. More recently we’ve become more inclined to show several design options as live pages on our dev servers. This way, our clients are able to see the proper functionaility of the site and how it might work on different screen sizes and devices.

However, we’ve also worked with providing flat designs as PDFs, as well as working other people’s design concepts into a fully-functioning site. This website for Dynes & Co was provided to us as digital Photoshop files.

Andy begain working as a Graphic Designer, working preminiantly in design-for-print. Origin8 creative is still providing this service. As more of our clients started requiring digital design services, including web design, we thought we’d create a separate brand dedicated and focussed on providing great website design and development services.

Originally begining in design means we’re able to provide a full design service. However, we’ve also married this with excellent technical knowledge, meaning we’re able to provide a full web design and development package.

We use WordPress in combination with an intuative and responsive template. With a background in design, we wanted to use an out-of-the box solution that was powerful enough to expand to provide any required funtionaility.

In 2019, WordPress accounted for over 35% of all websites on the internet. This popularity means there are numerous templates and plugins to provide both cutting edge design and limitless functionality.

Our familiarity with WordPress allows us to focus on the web design. If required, it allows our customers to easily update their own content.

As well as hosted WordPress websites we use Adobe Creative Cloud. We use applications such as Photoshop and Illustrator to create the graphics, optimise images and design logos.

In a word, yes!

WordPress offers clear html markup, SEO-friendly links, title and heading tags, easy content creation and optimised images. These are features included in the WordPress core and there are plenty of optimisations, plugins and configurations that can easily be applied to improve your website SEO.

Yes, we can provide various costs for your web hosting requirements.

Generally, smaller sites are fine with reasonably priced shared hosting. However, we’ve also worked with Cloud providers that offer more speed and scalability if this is required. Our experience with hosting means we’ve now found several suppliers who provide great service and performance for our WordPress websites. 

When we provide a quote for web design we tend to enquire as to hosting requirements and provide a separate quote showing various options.

The hosting packages we provide will include email and we can manage these for you. If you’d prefer we can point your MX records to your preferred email provider – GSuite or Exchange for example.

If you already have a domain, we can help set this up with either our or your hosting. 

Alternatively, we can look for domain options for you and manage these in your name.

Definitely! We have a number of clients who like to keep their own content up-to-date. The sites we create using WordPress have a built-in CMS (content management system). The templates we use are also intuiative to use, and in many cases, web updates can be done in the front end of the browser.

If this is an option you’d like to explore, we can sit down with you, or go through the process over the phone.

Certainly! Some of our clients aren’t interested in accessing, maintaining and updating their websites. However, they do sometimes require updates, additions and redesigns carried out. We can either charge you for one-off updates or work on a retainer to provide a number of hours work per month/year.

Again, this is something that, if required, we would show in our quotation.

If you host your site with us, as part of our service package, we’ll maintain the security of your website and keep the site up-to-date.

This means we periodically update WordPress, the plugins and themes as well as maintaining off-site backups.

We also host our sites on well-maintained servers for security. While no site is ever 100% secure, the chosen host, installation of SSL certificates and our periodic updates means your site will be well protected.

If a problem were ever to occur, the off-site backups mean we can easily restore the site.

Most of our clients are small organisations, individuals and start-ups. We like the connection this gives us to our clients and means there is usually a more personal connection to the projects we work on.

However, we have also worked with some larger organisations and agencies.

Hmmmmmmm, tricky one. Probably, banana!