You talk to the person who does the work
I get asked this in different words most weeks. Someone in Hull or Beverley or Driffield has only ever dealt with agencies, or with a mate's nephew who did it as a favour, and they want to know what the option in the middle is actually like day to day.
I have already written about why I work direct rather than through an agency, which is my side of it. This is the other half: what it means for you once the work starts.
There is no account manager. You email me or you ring me, and the person who replies is the person who wrote the code. Nothing gets relayed, so nothing gets lost in the relaying.
The honest downside: if I am three hours into a tricky build, you might get a reply at five o'clock rather than in four minutes. An agency has someone whose entire job is answering you quickly. I do not. What you get instead is an answer from someone who already knows your site.
How a change actually gets made
You spot a typo on your services page. You send me a message. It is usually done that day, often within the hour, and I tell you when it is live.
Something bigger, a new booking form or a page template that does not exist yet, works differently. I tell you roughly how long it will take and when I can start it. If it is going to cost you money I say so before I begin, not after. No ticket queue, no change request form, no minimum billing increment that turns a two minute fix into an hour.
I will tell you when not to spend money
A decent chunk of what people ask me for is either already possible with what they have, or not worth doing. Saying that out loud costs me work in the short term and saves the relationship in the long term. Most of my enquiries come from people I have worked with before, so the maths is fine.
If you want to see how I put a number on a job in the first place, I set that out in how I quote a website.
What happens when I am ill, or away, or gone
This is the sensible objection to hiring one person, and it deserves a straight answer rather than reassurance.
Everything lives in your accounts, not mine. The domain is registered to you. The hosting is billed to you. The code sits in a repository you have access to. I do not hold anything hostage and there is nothing you would need to ask my permission for.
That means if I am off for a fortnight, or if something happens to me, another competent developer can pick your site up and carry on. It will take them a few hours to find their way around, and that is the whole cost. I also tell clients when I am away in advance, and I do not disappear mid-project without saying so.
You own the lot
Some agencies keep the domain in their name, host on their account, and use a page builder licence that stops working the day you leave. It is not always deliberate, but the effect is the same: leaving costs you a rebuild.
I set everything up in your name from the start. If you decide in two years that you would rather work with someone else, you take the site with you and you owe me nothing.
Where I am not the right fit
Worth being clear about this, because a bad fit wastes both of us a month.
Large ecommerce replatforming, Magento work, or a full headless migration. That is a different discipline and I point people at headless-digital.com for it rather than pretending otherwise.
Anything that needs a developer on site five days a week. I work remotely most of the time and visit when it is useful.
A programme with several workstreams running in parallel and a project manager coordinating them. One person cannot be four people.
Situations where your board needs a recognisable agency name on the invoice. That is a real requirement and I am not going to talk you out of it.
The local part matters more than people expect
Most of the work is remote. Screens get shared, files get sent, nobody needs to be in the same room to change a header.
The first meeting is different. Sitting in your unit on the industrial estate, or in the back of your shop while the phone keeps going, tells me more in an hour than a form ever will. I see what your staff actually do all day, which is usually where the useful ideas come from. Being twenty minutes up the road from Hull rather than three hours away is what makes that hour cheap enough to be worth having.
If you are earlier in the process and still weighing up your options, I put together a longer piece on hiring a web developer in Hull that covers what to ask anyone you speak to, including me.
How to find out for nothing
I keep half an hour a week free for people who want a straight answer about their website and are not ready to buy anything. No pitch, no follow-up sequence. If the answer is that your current site is fine, I will say that and we will both get on with our day.
You can see what the free thirty minute surgery involves, or just get in touch and tell me what is bothering you about your site.
Free 30-min surgery
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