You shouldn’t need an account to find out how to change a price.

Day one is yours and takes about half an hour. An online questionnaire asks what you do, where you do it, what you charge, when you’re open and whether you have photographs. That’s the only part of the week that needs anything from you.

Days two to six are ours. A designer draws the site around your trade, because a barber’s site and an attorney’s site shouldn’t look the same. A writer turns your answers into real copy. Then the pages get built, the photographs get sourced and compressed, the forms get wired up and the whole thing is checked at three screen widths.

On day five a private preview link lands in your inbox. It’s a real, working website on a temporary address, not a picture of one.

Day seven you read it and send back anything you want changed. We make those changes the same business day, point your domain at the new site, switch on the SSL and it’s live.

Two more things. Nothing in that week needs a meeting: it’s all done in writing, so you have a record of what was asked for and you can answer at eleven at night if that’s when you get a minute. And the seven days are seven days of our work, not seven days from the moment you pay. If your questionnaire comes back on Thursday, the clock starts on Thursday.

If you want to know what will be in it before you start, the same week is drawn out as a build schedule on the websites page, and the five pages every small business website needs is the shape almost every one of them takes.

Nine things, all of them in the questionnaire:

• The business name, and one sentence on what you do
• The area you cover, or the address people come to
• Your services or products, and what each one costs, even as a range
• Opening hours, including the days you’re shut
• Where inquiries should land: an email address, for now
• Any qualifications, memberships or registrations worth showing
• Photographs, if you have them
• Your logo, if you have one
• The domain you already own, or the name you would like us to register

Two of those you’re allowed not to have. If you have no photographs, we source and license images that suit the trade and tell you which ones are stock, so you can replace them later with your own, and how many photographs a small business website needs is a shorter list than most people fear. If you have no logo, we set your name properly in type, which for most small businesses looks better than a logo bought for $20 anyway.

One thing that helps more than people expect: write your services in your own words, roughly, badly, in a hurry. A rough sentence that sounds like you is far more use to our writers than a polished paragraph copied off a competitor.

Your preview arrives by email around day five, at the address on your order. It’s a live website on a temporary address: click through it, fill in the contact form, open it on your phone. Nobody else can find it, because it isn’t linked from anywhere and it’s kept out of Google.

Send changes back as a numbered list, one change per line, and say which page each one is on. That sounds fussy and it’s the difference between one reply and four. Compare:

• Gets done in a minute. “Services page, second photograph down: swap it for the one attached. Also the price for a full color should be $95, not $85.”
• Takes three emails. “Can you make it pop a little more?”

Screenshots help enormously. Take one, scribble on it, drag it into live chat.

If the part you’re unsure about is the wording rather than the layout, writing a services page that gets inquiries is worth ten minutes before you send your notes back.

Changes are unlimited for the first thirty days, not just before it goes live, so you don’t have to catch everything in one pass. And if after those thirty days it’s still not right, you get the dollar back.

Log in, choose Your website and then Open the editor, pick the page from the menu at the top, then click straight into the text and type. It behaves like a document, with no boxes to drag and no grid to fight.

Nothing you type is live until you press Publish, top right. So you can leave a half-finished sentence, shut the laptop and come back to it. Once you do publish, the change is on the live site within about ten seconds.

It works on a phone as well, which is useful for the small things: a price that went up this morning, a day you have had to close.

Before you rewrite a page: the heading at the top of each page is doing a job in Google as well as on the screen. Changing “Emergency plumber in Columbus” to “Welcome” costs you more than it looks like it does. If you want to change a main heading, ask us first - it takes us thirty seconds to tell you whether it matters, and page titles and descriptions: the bit Google shows explains why the wording earns its keep.

Got it wrong? Version history keeps every published version, so yesterday’s page is two clicks away.

Click the picture, choose Replace, pick the new file, publish.

What to upload. The biggest version you have. The system makes all the smaller ones itself and compresses them, which is most of why the site is quick. Roughly 2000 pixels on the long edge is plenty; anything under about 800 will look soft on a laptop. JPEG and PNG are both fine, and a HEIC straight off an iPhone is converted for you.

Crop after, not before. Upload the full frame and use the crop handles in the editor. That way the same photograph can be a wide strip on a laptop and a square on a phone without you having to keep two copies.

Write the alt text. There’s a box for it under the image. One plain sentence describing what is in the picture. It’s what a blind visitor hears, and it’s one of the few things Google can read about a photograph.

Last thing, and it matters more than any of the above: use your own photographs where you possibly can. A slightly imperfect picture of your actual van, your actual salon or your actual food outsells a perfect stock image every time, and product photographs you can take on a phone covers the lighting and the backdrop in about five minutes.

Worth doing yourself, because it takes seconds: text, prices, opening hours, photographs, products, stock levels, staff names, a new blog post, a phrase you want reworded.

Worth sending to us, because it’s finicky and we are already looking at it all day:

• A new page, and where it should sit in the menu
• A new section dropped into the middle of an existing page
• Anything that changes the layout rather than the words in it
• A form that needs different fields, or needs to go somewhere new
• Redirects, and anything to do with the domain, the DNS or the SSL
• Anything you have already tried once and it went sideways

There’s no charge for asking and no allowance of hours to use up. It’s part of the hosting you pay for monthly, and it’s the main reason people stay. Send it on live chat or by email, with a screenshot if there’s anything to point at. Most changes are done the same business day.

Don’t sit on something because it feels too small to bother us with. A one-word typo on your prices page is exactly the sort of thing we’d rather fix in a minute than have you live with for a year.

There are two ways, and the first one is the one we recommend to almost everybody.

1. Hand us the nameservers. Log in wherever you bought the domain, find the section called Nameservers or DNS, delete what is in there and paste in the two addresses we send you, then save. That’s it. From that point we run the DNS, the SSL and the mail records for you, and you never have to think about any of it again.

2. Keep your DNS where it is and change two records. If you’d rather keep control, or someone else is running mail on the domain, we’ll send you an A record for the bare domain and a CNAME for the www version. You add those two, leave everything else alone, and the website comes to us while the DNS stays with you. The trade is that the mail records stay your responsibility, and they’re the ones that go wrong.

Either way it isn’t instant. Allow up to 24 hours for the change to spread, though in practice most people see it inside an hour. During that window some visitors will see the new site and some will still see the old one, which is normal and not a fault.

If you have email on that domain already, tell us before we start. Say so in the questionnaire or on chat. We copy the existing mail records across first, so your email carries on working straight through the switch. If nobody mentions it, that’s the one way this goes wrong.

If you haven’t bought the name yet, registering a domain with us skips all of the above, and the domain names page is worth reading before you buy one anywhere.

In the dashboard open Email, then Add mailbox. Choose the part that goes before the @, set a password, save. The mailbox exists in about a minute and you can read it straight away in any browser.

What to call it. Sole proprietors usually want their own first name. Shops, salons and trades usually want something general like hello or info, so that it still makes sense when someone else answers it. You can have both: create the one you want people to write to, then add the other as an alias pointing at it, so there’s still only one inbox to read.

What not to call it. Avoid anything that looks automated - noreply, admin, webmaster. Spam filters are suspicious of them and customers don’t write to them.

How many you get. One mailbox on your own domain is carried by the hosting, and more can be added as the business needs them. If you aren’t sure what your own hosting allows, ask on chat and we’ll tell you in a sentence.

Once it exists, read it in any browser, or set it up in Outlook or Apple Mail using the guides below. Don’t forward it to a free webmail account and reply from there - the reply goes out with the wrong address on it, which rather defeats the point. Business email on your own name puts numbers on how much difference that makes to whether people write back.

Three records in your domain’s DNS decide whether the rest of the internet believes an email that claims to be from you. They sound like a law firm and they’re three short lines of text.

• SPF lists which servers are allowed to send email using your domain name. Anything sent from somewhere else on the list gets treated with suspicion.
• DKIM adds an invisible signature to every message you send, so the receiving server can prove it wasn’t tampered with in transit.
• DMARC tells the receiving server what to do when one of the other two fails - ignore it, put it in junk, or refuse it - and asks it to report back.

If your domain’s nameservers point at us, all three are already set and you have nothing to do. This is the main reason we suggest handing over the nameservers.

If you kept your DNS somewhere else, these are the three records most often missing. Ask us on chat and we’ll send you the exact values to paste in, and check them afterwards. The business email page sets out what is included with a mailbox.

Then there’s the part no record can fix. Send from your own domain rather than a free webmail address. Don’t put the whole message inside one image. Avoid a subject line in capitals with an exclamation mark. If you’re writing to a list, use a mailing tool instead of two hundred addresses in BCC. And when you first switch over, ask two or three regular customers to drag your message out of junk and mark it as not spam - it teaches their provider surprisingly quickly.

The $1 buys the website. Today you pay $1 for the website plus your first month of hosting. After that hosting is $8.99 a month, billed on the same date each month until you cancel, and you can cancel in any month. The design, the writing, up to ten pages, the photographs sourced and optimized, the contact form, the technical SEO and your Google Business Profile set up. It’s charged once, at the start. The same build is openly sold at $1,500, which is what a US agency charges for a small business site of this size. There’s nothing further to pay for the website itself, ever.

The hosting is the only monthly charge. It carries one mailbox on your own name, the SSL certificate, the nightly backups, the CDN, the software updates, the DNS and renewals on your domain, and our team making changes for you when you ask. The .com is included on the Complete plan at $18.99 a month. On Basic at $8.99 a month the name is registered in your own name and run for you, and the registry’s own annual fee for it, about $12 a year, is billed separately at cost.

Every website on earth has to be hosted by someone. You aren’t paying us for the website each month - the website was a dollar - you’re paying for the thing that keeps it online and looked after.

Taking on more services doesn’t buy a better website, it buys more of the things that sit beside it: extra mailboxes, invoicing, SEO, bookings, live chat, storage and a store, added as the business needs them. Move up and down whenever you like. The website underneath is the same one you paid a dollar for.

When it’s taken. The first month of hosting is paid when you order, together with the website, and then on that same date each month. Card only, through Stripe, so we never see or hold your card number. Your receipt appears in the dashboard within a few minutes of each payment and can be downloaded for your accounts.

No contract, no minimum term, no notice period, and no price jump after a first year. The web hosting page lists everything the hosting carries.

Dashboard → Billing → Cancel hosting. It stops at the end of the month you have already paid for. No exit fee, no notice period, and nobody chasing you to talk you out of it.

Your domain stays yours. It’s registered in your name, not ours. Ask and we release it with the transfer code so you can take it wherever you like. That’s true whether you have been with us a month or five years.

Your content stays yours too. Ask before the last day and we send you the text, the photographs and any customer, booking or order data as ordinary files you can open. There’s no charge for that either.

The website itself comes down when the hosting stops, because hosting is the thing that keeps it up. Your mailboxes stop at the same moment, so move any email you want to keep before the last day.

We hold your data for thirty days after the final payment in case you change your mind, then delete it. Come back inside those thirty days and everything is switched back on exactly as you left it.

If you’re canceling because the site isn’t right, tell us that first. Fixing it costs nothing and is almost always quicker than starting again somewhere else. The formal version of all of the above is our refunds and cancellation policy.

In the editor, open Pages on the left and choose Add a page. Give it a name, pick what it starts with (a blank page, services, contact, booking, a gallery and a few more), and leave Add it to the menu ticked. The new page opens straight away, ready to click into and change.

The menu sits under the pages in the same panel. Drag the links into the order you want, click one to rename it or point it somewhere else, and remove anything that doesn’t earn its place. A menu link can go to a page, to one section of a page, to a phone call or to your booking calendar.

Before you add a page, ask whether a section on an existing page would do. Five clear pages beat twelve thin ones. Any section can be copied or moved to another page from the list down the left, and your plan’s page allowance is under Plan and usage in the panel.

Your website takes its hours from one of two places, and the editor shows which under Settings, Opening hours.

If it says your calendar, change them in Calendar, Hours in the panel. When you save, the hours on your website and on your booking page update together, with nothing to publish.

If you typed them into the editor, change them there and publish. Add a row for a holiday or a day you’re closing early.

Your Google Business Profile is separate. Change the hours there too, or ask us and we’ll do it.

Everything you change in the editor saves as you go, but visitors only see it when you press Publish, top right. Until then the arrows next to it undo and redo one step at a time.

Each time you publish, the version that was live is kept. Open History in the editor to see them, open any one to look at it, and choose Use this to bring it back into the editor. Nothing goes live until you publish again, so you can check it first.

Starting again from one of our designs works the same way: what you had is kept in History first.

Three things cause almost all of these, and two of them clear up without anyone doing anything.

1. The site has only just moved. The certificate is issued once your domain starts pointing at us, so there’s a short window where a browser can be asking the new address for a page before the certificate has finished being fetched and installed. It sorts itself out, usually inside the hour and at worst inside a day.

2. You’re looking at a cached copy of the old site. Your own browser is the most likely thing in the country to still be holding yesterday’s version, because you visit your own site far more often than your customers do. Open it in a private window, or on cellular data with the wi-fi switched off. If it’s secure there, it’s secure.

3. One thing on the page is being loaded over plain http. A single image, font or embedded map pasted in with an address starting http rather than https is enough for a browser to call the whole page insecure, even though the page itself is fine. This is the one that doesn’t fix itself. Send us the address of the page and we’ll find the line, usually in a couple of minutes.

What it is almost never is an expired certificate. Ours renew themselves every ninety days and the monitoring tells us before a visitor could see it. The certificate, the renewal and the whole https side of the site are carried by the hosting, and if your nameservers point at us there’s nothing here for you to configure at all, which is the argument the domain names page makes for handing them over.

Outlook is poor at working these out on its own, so add the account by hand rather than letting it guess. File → Add account, type the address, then choose Advanced options and check Let me set up my account manually. Pick IMAP.

• Incoming server: the address we send you, port 993, encryption SSL/TLS
• Outgoing server: the same address, port 465, encryption SSL/TLS
• Username: the whole email address, the part after the @ included. This is the box people get wrong.
• Password: the mailbox password, which isn’t the same as your DEVIQO account password

The one box people always miss is on the outgoing server: “my outgoing server requires authentication”, set to use the same settings as the incoming server. Without it, mail arrives perfectly well and nothing you send ever leaves.

Choose IMAP rather than POP unless you have a very particular reason not to. IMAP leaves the mail on the server, so the same inbox reads the same on your laptop, on your phone and in a browser. POP takes messages off the server and onto one machine, and the day that machine dies is the day you find out.

If it won’t connect, open the mailbox in a browser first. If it works there, the address and the password are right and the problem is a setting in Outlook. Send us a screenshot on chat and we’ll point at the field. The business email page sets out what a mailbox carries, and the same settings work in Apple Mail, Thunderbird and anything else that speaks IMAP.

Invoices → New invoice. Your own details are already on it, so there are three parts to fill in.

Who it is to. The customer’s name, and for an LLC or corporation the registered name rather than the DBA, because that’s the name their accounts department will be looking for. Save it once and it’s in the list from then on.

The lines. One line for each thing you did, with a quantity and a price. Resist the single line reading “work as agreed”. An itemized invoice is queried far less often, and on the occasions it’s queried you have already written the answer.

The terms. A due date, not “on receipt”. Fourteen days is usual for a small job and thirty for a larger one. Whichever you pick goes on the document, the automatic reminders count from it, and nobody can say they didn’t know when it was due.

Then Send. It goes out as an email with the invoice attached and a Pay now button in the message, so a card settles it in about twenty seconds without anyone having to open a banking app. You can see when it was opened and when it was paid.

Set two things on the first one, because they carry over to every invoice after it: your EIN or state tax number if you have one, and the automatic reminders, so you never have to write the awkward email yourself. The invoicing page shows the rest of it, and how to get paid faster: eight things that work is the shortest useful list on the subject we know of.

Calendar → Booking page → Deposits. Switch it on, choose a fixed amount or a percentage, and it’s taken by card at the moment someone books. The money goes into your own Stripe account, and it lands on the same schedule as the rest of your card payments.

How much to ask for. Enough that losing it stings slightly, and not so much that it puts anyone off. For most trades and salons that’s fifteen to thirty dollars, or a fifth of the job for anything expensive. What matters is the difference between an appointment someone has paid something toward and one they haven’t.

What it does to your calendar. It also filters out the bookings that were never going to happen, which is worth as much as the money is. A Saturday morning with four real appointments in it beats one with six, two of which won’t show up.

Say what happens to it. One line under the deposit box: whether it comes off the final bill, how much notice you need for a refund, and what happens if someone can’t make it. People don’t mind paying a deposit. They mind not knowing the rules.

Refunding one takes two clicks from the booking, and it’s back on the customer’s card in a few business days. The bookings and calendar page covers the rest of the calendar, and taking deposits: how to stop no-shows goes further into the wording than a help guide should.

The agent answers from what you give it and from nothing else, so what you give it is the whole job. It takes about twenty minutes, once.

What to give it. Your prices, or your price ranges. Your opening hours, the days you’re shut included. The area you cover. Roughly how long the common jobs take. What you don’t do, which saves more of your time than what you do. Your deposit, cancellation and refund rules in your own words. And the six questions you’re sick of typing out by hand.

What to keep well away from it. Anything you wouldn’t put on a poster in the window. Staff details, customer information, anything about one particular job, what your suppliers charge you, and any figure you aren’t willing to be held to. If a number might move next month, give it as a range and say that it’s a guide.

Write it as though you were speaking. “A full set is usually around seventy dollars and takes about an hour” answers the question someone asked. A price table doesn’t.

Then try to trip it up. Ask it something it can’t know, something ambiguous and something rude. It should say it doesn’t know and offer to take a message instead of inventing an answer. That rule is built in, so there’s no setting to find. The live chat page sets out how the handover to you works, and what a visitor sees at midnight when nobody is on.

Every night, and it’s a good deal more than the website:

• The site itself: every page, every image and every setting
• The mailboxes on your domain, with what is in them
• Bookings, invoices, and everything your forms have taken

How far back it goes. Thirty nights, held somewhere other than the machine serving your site, so one bad day at one data center can’t take the live copy and the backup together. Nothing here is kept in only one place.

Asking for a restore. Chat or email, and tell us the date you want back and whether you want the whole site or one page of it. Most are done inside the hour. There’s no charge and no limit on how often you ask: if you have deleted something at four thirty on a Friday, this is exactly what it is for.

It isn’t the same thing as version history. Version history is instant, self-service and covers the page you’re editing. The backup covers the whole business and the day something went badly wrong. Use the first for a typo and the second for a disaster.

What we are held to on all of this is written down on the service level page and a year of the website: what to check every twelve months includes the thing almost nobody does, which is ask for a restore once before they need one.