You have questions. We have answers.
Website Design Questions
It really depends on the size of your project. No two business’ needs are exactly the same, therefore we always start with a Discovery Session to talk about the details of your project and your business goals. After our meeting, we can give you a realistic timeline and project cost.
We build custom websites that include a 4 stage process of discovery / design / launch / support. This requires proper planning and research to make sure we’re delivering a quality product that will help convert visitors into customers. For a smaller website, the budget is typically between $3000-$5000. This price will increase depending on how large the project is and the amount or work required to achieve your business goals. A new website is about growing your business and leveraging your brand story, so we like to focus on the payoff, if your site is generating leads that help you increase your sales, isn’t the investment in a new website worth it?
We use a content management system (CMS) to build your website, which means when we’re done, you’ll be able to make edits to the content. But before we turn the keys over to you, we’ll provide training to make sure you understand how the CMS works and how to use it. We’re also more than happy to help you with your ongoing marketing efforts by providing print materials, blogging services, and strategic consulting.
Most business owners wear many hats and prefer to keep their focus on running the day to day, if that’s you, we can provide ongoing support through one of our Website Care Plans.
Depending on the requirements of a project and the budget, we may use premium plugins to create the desired effect. That said, we do not use any plugins that we don’t feel confident will continue running efficiently moving forward and our sites are built with future releases of both the plugins and WordPress itself in mind. We try to keep plugins down to the bare minimum (contact forms, SEO, e-commerce) and rely on native WordPress as much as possible during the built.
Any plugins used in a website should be acquired from premium providers such as Gravity Forms and Yoast SEO, both of whom are tested and have been well known in the WordPress community for years. Using plugins can help keep the programming costs down and premium providers are reputable companies with full support teams of their own, which we feel is incredibly important when choosing the plugins that will be used in a website. If you have subscribed to one of our Website Care Plans, rest soundly knowing that we always make sure to test plugin updates on a duplicate of your site before applying them to the live site, just to be sure everything will play nice. These updates and any recommendations will be noted in your Care Plan monthly report.
Templates and themes normally come with plenty of built-in features so that the user can have more customizability, but this ultimately weighs down the website in terms of load speed and SEO performance. It’s very likely that you’ll have to put up with features, designs, and functions that won’t necessarily fit your brand or business. You could pay a web development company to fix it, but every developer has their own signature style of programming, and it will most likely cost more in the long run to have your template adjusted to fit your needs.
Well, you COULD go with the guy on Kijiji that promised you a site for $300, but honestly, is that really what your business is worth to you?
Your website should be thought of as an investment, NOT and expense. By using a professional, you’re hiring someone who is going to think about the bigger picture and then create a plan to cover the important details:
- User Experience
- Unique design based on your business needs
- Being 100% responsive across Desktop, Laptop, Tablet & Smart Phone
- Being search engine friendly so people can find you online
- Testing to work across all browsers
And the MOST important! - Converting visitors in paying customers!
Hey, we get it, sometimes relationships don’t work out, and that’s okay. With WordPress being used on roughly 43% of websites on the internet today, there is an abundance of developers that specialize in WordPress as a CMS Platform, it’s actually a major reason we use it! We want our clients to be happy, even if that means parting ways sometimes, by building on WordPress, it allows another developer to take over in the future if necessary. If at any point in the relationship either of us feel like it’s no longer a good fit, we’ll help you transition to your new developer of choice.
If you’re not quite ready to take the plunge or aren’t sure what you want, we’d be happy to schedule a discovery session with you to discuss your website goals and a plan for achieving them. Once you have a plan, you’ll be able to make an educated decision on whether or not it’s a worthwhile investment to move forward. Learn more about a Discovery Session here.
Ready to free your time?
Website Care Plan Questions
Our website care plans are typically reserved for clients who have had their website built by us. If we’ve built it, we know every line of code and all of the variables and combinations of things that hang together to make it work, so we are in the best position to keep your website up and running and open for business. If your website was built elsewhere we would require a Website Evaluation in order to ensure we understand how the site was built and if there are any elements of concern we (and you) should be aware of. Once we’ve completed our evaluation, we’ll determine if one of our care plans might be a suitable fit for your needs. If not, we’ll recommend a more suitable provider. Our fee for performing a Website Evaluation is $449 +HST. Give us a call if you’d like to discuss his service further.
You simply send us an email with clear instructions on the content you want to change on your website and we’ll schedule the work and let you know when it’s done – usually by the next business day. Changes include any text or image change that will take us 30 minutes or less. This typically covers things like updating an event page, adding a testimonials section or editing your menu items. These tasks do not cover advanced or custom features like an online shop or membership section. They also don’t cover graphic design tasks.
The whole purpose of our care plans is preventative care, so we work hard to prevent anything from happening. However, in the case something does happen and your website needs emergency care, we will be there right by its side communicating with the web hosting company on your behalf. We cannot promise your website will not be hacked but can promise we will do everything in our power to prevent it, as well as assist in the restoration and cleanup of the website with one of our backups.
If you have a task that is beyond what is included in your plan, we’ll need you to fill in a separate project brief so we can be clear on what you need and create a separate quote. However, many times we will evaluate requests that exceed your plan on a case by case basis, and with approval, work past the time and bill for time exceeded at the support rate listed on your plan.
No, it’s been our experience that many hosting providers either overload their servers or do not meet our minimum requirements for security, speed and WordPress optimization. All of our Care Plan clients are hosted on our Premium Agency Server which is specifically tuned for WordPress. Every account includes dedicated resources, so you aren’t sharing your server space with anyone else, leading to better performance and security. Once you become a client of Mediavandals, we’ll migrate you to your dedicated space at no extra charge (a $199 value).
Once you choose your care plan level, you’ll receive an onboarding package which includes a Terms of Service agreement, your first invoice and a Credit Card authorization form to complete your sign-up. Depending on the date of sign-up, your card will be automatically processed on either the 1st or the 15th of each month. You may cancel your care plan at any time with 30 days written notice.
Absolutely. We are all about building a valuable relationship with you and your website, so we would hate to see you go but we know financial needs weigh on many decisions and don’t want to lock anyone in. You may request a cancellation via email with 30 days notice to payments@patientboost.dental, and we will immediately stop the next payment.
Each of our above plans covers monthly care of one (1) standard WordPress website. Please contact us to discuss costing for Ecommerce Care Plans.
No, much like a gym membership the call time and tasks are there for you every month to reserve your place in our queue, and therefore they do not rollover.
No. Have peace of mind knowing that we manage plugin updates for all Care Plan clients. Please leave the updating to us. Website maintenance is an integral part of updating and keeping your site working properly and we take great care to first backup the website, check the website, update, then check the website again for any changes. Our software keeps a record of plugins we update so if there is ever an issue we can see what plugin version was changed and revert back. If you merely update from your WordPress dashboard, we wouldn’t have that record and might experience difficulty pinpointing the underlying issue.
If you received an email about your website files being compromised, first make sure it is legitimate. Any emails regarding your website or hosting would come from a member of our team with an @patientboost.dental address. If you are unsure, forward the email to our support team using the support email address provided to you upon sign-up. If we investigate and find this is a legitimate issue, we will manage clean-up and restore your website under the terms of your website care plan. If it is not a legitimate email, we will inform you and will advise to add the sender to your spam list. Unfortunately as long as there have been websites, there have been people willing to hack them and we can’t 100% guarantee this won’t happen, but we’ll do everything in our power to prevent it, and if it does happen, we’ll work with your web host to get you back up and running quickly.
If your website is not loading, first check to make sure this is the same experience for everyone at DownForEveryoneOrJustMe – http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/
If the website is down just for you, try clearing your browser history (cache and cookies) and reload, also checking your internet connection. If the website is down for everyone, send us a support request to our support email.
Most likely our website uptime monitor has already alerted us by that point and we’re already working on the issue, but your peace of mind is what’s most important!
Case Study
Dickens Yard Dental
Meet Dr. Sahil Thakkar. Owner, founder, and principal dentist of Dickens Yard Dental, a dental practice based in West London. As a brand new business, the main goal was to increase the number of new patients to kick things off.
