358 articles
Three businesses ask us this same question in three different ways, and the honest answer is rarely the biggest option. This guide hands you a five minute test built from three questions, the build and running numbers we quote in practice for each choice, and the plain arithmetic that shows when the cheaper option earns more. By the end you will have a decision, a budget and a next step.
The stack you pick shapes cost, speed and how easily you can hire and scale later. Here is how to choose wisely.
Custom is not always the answer — but when your workflow is your edge, a tailored app beats any template.
Your new site got compliments and the enquiry inbox barely moved, which is a specific problem with a specific fix. This is the arithmetic of your own website in three numbers you can find in an afternoon, the five changes we make for real clients in the order that moves the number, and an honest account of when repairing five pages beats paying for a full rebuild.
Understand what ERP software really does, the signs you have outgrown spreadsheets, and how a custom system pays for itself.
Most guides to this decision hand you a polite checklist and leave you no wiser when you are actually sitting across the table. This one does the opposite. Here are the exact questions to ask a web design company, the answers that should make you pause, the arithmetic behind a US$2,000 quote against a US$12,000 one, the timeline you can hold anyone to, and an honest account of when the cheapest option is the right one.
Nearly every article on this subject tells you to buy software in the first paragraph. This one does the opposite: it gives you the actual break points in units, editors and hours, the arithmetic to price your own situation on a calculator, the costs that hide inside an ordinary working week, and a plain statement of when keeping the spreadsheet is still the correct business decision.
Most owners are sold a shape before anybody asks how many things they actually sell, so here is the arithmetic we use with clients instead: how many addresses a search engine gets to rank, what each extra page really adds to the bill and the calendar, what a single page quietly hides from your own numbers, and a five question test that reaches an answer in ten minutes, including the many times the honest answer is the cheaper one page site.
Most comparisons of these two paths stop at a feature list, so this one hands you the arithmetic we actually run with clients instead: what the sellable layer adds on top of the very same screens, what each path costs to run every month, how many paying customers it takes to break even, and the honest cases where buying something ready-made, or simply keeping the tool internal, is the smarter purchase.
An 18 percent miss rate in a five clinician practice quietly costs around 19,000 US dollars a month, and yet half of those misses are simply forgetting, which is the cheapest problem you will ever fix. This guide separates the misses software genuinely solves from the ones only your scheduling policy can, prices every fix with arithmetic you can check on paper, and says plainly which clinics should spend nothing at all.
Most articles on this question are written by people who sell redesigns, so they list ten symptoms and conclude that you need one. This is the honest version: the four numbers on your own dashboard that settle the argument, the seven symptoms that really do mean rebuild, the five complaints that almost never do, and the cheaper repairs that fix the same problem for a fraction of the money.
Missing text, not design, is what usually holds a website up. This guide skips the vague advice and hands over the working parts: where to find the words you already own in your own inbox, the order to write your pages in, how long each one should be, a five block skeleton that turns a blank screen into a draft, a recording method that gets a page drafted in about an hour and a half once the questions are collected, and the arithmetic of when to pay a writer instead.
