New small Ltd service company - set up recommendations
Discussion
Morning All.
I am seeking some recommendations for various set up providers for a small service based company, so in no particular order I am seeking views on the following. Please also keep in mind anything technology based side needs to be "A Dummy's Guide" due to v limited skills and lack of time.
1. Basic Website to include email (<5 email addresses required) - no functionality required other than a few pages displaying services. Non-transactional.
2. Recommendations for virtual office providers. I do not foresee any physical post requirements so company and director addresses for CH.
3. Accountants - will be VAT and corporation tax returns and personal tax - incoming transactions estimated at 50 PA in early days.
4. Telephone routing options - ideally a UK landline number that then routes calls via internet to either a laptop with bluetooth connection or a non-landline hardphone.
Take it easy on me for my technophobe side please but am all ears.
I am seeking some recommendations for various set up providers for a small service based company, so in no particular order I am seeking views on the following. Please also keep in mind anything technology based side needs to be "A Dummy's Guide" due to v limited skills and lack of time.
1. Basic Website to include email (<5 email addresses required) - no functionality required other than a few pages displaying services. Non-transactional.
2. Recommendations for virtual office providers. I do not foresee any physical post requirements so company and director addresses for CH.
3. Accountants - will be VAT and corporation tax returns and personal tax - incoming transactions estimated at 50 PA in early days.
4. Telephone routing options - ideally a UK landline number that then routes calls via internet to either a laptop with bluetooth connection or a non-landline hardphone.
Take it easy on me for my technophobe side please but am all ears.
Shnozz said:
1. Basic Website to include email (<5 email addresses required) - no functionality required other than a few pages displaying services. Non-transactional.
I've used Namesco a few times. They provide the domain, email addresses, hosting and a built-it-yourself website editor which is reasonably intuitive. But if you get stuck, they'll build it for you for £400 or thereabout.Shnozz said:
2. Recommendations for virtual office providers. I do not foresee any physical post requirements so company and director addresses for CH.
Unless there's a specific need I wouldn't bother. I had intended to do this when I set my company up (based at home) but never got around to it and can say with absolute certainty that not having a virtual office has in no way affected the business.Shnozz said:
3. Accountants - will be VAT and corporation tax returns and personal tax - incoming transactions estimated at 50 PA in early days.
Ask around locally. You just need a decent one-person Accountant or small firm. I pay mine £95 a month for all of the above.Shnozz said:
4. Telephone routing options - ideally a UK landline number that then routes calls via internet to either a laptop with bluetooth connection or a non-landline hardphone.
Again, think if you really need this. My business has one phone number - my mobile. HTH
Thanks Stevie.
Not my first rodeo but wanted to see what options were out there, partly from "mistakes" made in the past,
The phone requirement is a must as I don't want to be giving a mobile number, plus the fact I don't want clients to be met with a foreign ring tone when I am logged in from abroad so hence wanting a VOIP service that doesn't project as one externally, but just a local landline. Anyone?
Accountancy historically I have found many to be expensive bookkeepers - if that is what the service is, then inclined to only pay for a bookkeeper. If I get some proactive advice then don't mind paying for the extra.
Not my first rodeo but wanted to see what options were out there, partly from "mistakes" made in the past,
The phone requirement is a must as I don't want to be giving a mobile number, plus the fact I don't want clients to be met with a foreign ring tone when I am logged in from abroad so hence wanting a VOIP service that doesn't project as one externally, but just a local landline. Anyone?
Accountancy historically I have found many to be expensive bookkeepers - if that is what the service is, then inclined to only pay for a bookkeeper. If I get some proactive advice then don't mind paying for the extra.
We use these folks to push through a geographic number to our mobiles using app.
No matter where in the world we are our outbound calls look like they are coming from our London office:
Cheap as chips also.
https://c-it.co.uk/hosted-phone-system/
No matter where in the world we are our outbound calls look like they are coming from our London office:
Cheap as chips also.
https://c-it.co.uk/hosted-phone-system/
Shnozz said:
Accountancy historically I have found many to be expensive bookkeepers - if that is what the service is, then inclined to only pay for a bookkeeper. If I get some proactive advice then don't mind paying for the extra.
I think for most small businesses, that's not too wide from the mark.The fee I pay my accountant includes a Quick Books subscription which is linked to the business bank account. Providing you set it up correctly and keep an eye on it, it's automated bookkeeping. Admittedly I don't raise that many invoices over the course of a year.
V8RAW said:
We use these folks to push through a geographic number to our mobiles using app.
No matter where in the world we are our outbound calls look like they are coming from our London office:
Cheap as chips also.
https://c-it.co.uk/hosted-phone-system/
Thanks - really useful. Will get in touch with them. No matter where in the world we are our outbound calls look like they are coming from our London office:
Cheap as chips also.
https://c-it.co.uk/hosted-phone-system/
StevieBee said:
Shnozz said:
1. Basic Website to include email (<5 email addresses required) - no functionality required other than a few pages displaying services. Non-transactional.
I've used Namesco a few times. They provide the domain, email addresses, hosting and a built-it-yourself website editor which is reasonably intuitive. But if you get stuck, they'll build it for you for £400 or thereabout.So long as your customers all have super fast broadband, don't have any kind of accessibility requirement, and aren't overly fussed about finding you in the search results then I guess that's not a problem.
Otherwise, no. Just, no.
12MB of resources to fully load their demo restaurant desktop template homepage. If that was a person they'd be classed as morbidly obese and having to be craned out of their home into the back of an oversized ambulance. That page should absolutely not be any more than 1MB and more like 500KB, including any custom web fonts and cached JS and CSS for subsequent pages.
The Mobile version is still over 4MB. Hmm 8MB difference - that immediately suggests to me that there's a YouTube video embedded on the desktop page without using a façade. Ah yes, the purely decorative video next to opening times is actually a YouTube video set to autoplay. Great, 8MB of bloat for what? To distract the customer from the important information next to it? Great bit of design work there.
Over 200 HTML validation errors. Not just warnings, but actual errors. I can't even begin to imagine how little knowledge of HTML it requires to get 200 validation errors in one page. So why then are they choosing to use super-fussy "you'd better know what you're doing" XHTML, instead of more forgiving HTML? I have absolutely no idea. I doubt they do either. That's a very odd choice and usually indicates that somebody copy-pasted the doctype declaration without understanding what they copy-pasted. That the page renders at all is testament to the forgiving nature of modern browsers.
Accessibility failures - basic level A failures. Not AAA, or AA, but single A. The most basic "please don't sue my company for having an inaccessible website" level of all. And they even fail that.
Let's try adjusting the browser font size because you know, maybe my eyesight isn't what it used to be. It's a good test to see exactly what regard the site designer has for anybody with less than perfect vision. Result: no difference at all. None whatsoever. Because font size is set in px and not rem or em. That's a great big "f*** you" to anybody that isn't blessed with perfect vision. If I had a restaurant, I'm not sure that's the message I'd be wanting to send out to my older customers.
Semantic HTML? No, of course not. Div soup and late 90s era style mixed with HTML. Separation of concerns? Good grief no. They can't even structure their headings correctly so why would we expect anything more. Another "f*** you" to anybody that isn't viewing the website on a screen (which includes search engines).
But you know, maybe their Lighthouse scores will be OK. After all, they go out of their way to tell us how fast their sites are and how important that is for your SEO:
namesco said:
Our Website Builder also makes Google happy because it's super-fast. Site speed is a key ranking factor, so not only do your visitors enjoy a great user experience, you’ll also get better search engine results - it’s a win, win!
Let's take a look at this "win, win" by testing Lighthouse on their mobile view:
Oh dear, oh dear. I'd call that "lose, lose". I've seen worse, but not by much.
And finally, just for the giggles, what happens if you visit this template demo with Javascript disabled? Oh, no restaurant menu for you to look at. Because loading images and text now depends entirely on Javascript? Since when did that become a good idea? You'll have to guess what's on the menu. It's at least consistent because there's no mobile navigation menu either. Pfft, who needs one of them?
This would be funny if there weren't real people and their businesses being taken for a ride by garbage like this. It's cheap for a reason. But how much is it really costing? How many customers aren't finding you because it's crippling your SEO? How many customers are giving up waiting for your site to load and going to your competitors instead? How many can't actually read or navigate your website? How much are you now having to spend on Google ads to compensate for this crap? You don't know, because those lost customers sure aren't going to tell you.
For a website I would choose a template from themeforest.com. Wordpress has the biggest choice but you can also find templates for other CMS.
You could then find a friendly techie or hire someone from Upwork to set it up and customise it for you.
Should be less than a £250 all in and it’s fine for a startup venture.
If branding is particularly important you could get a designer and have something custom built. Even that doesn’t have to be expensive for a brochureware web site.
You could then find a friendly techie or hire someone from Upwork to set it up and customise it for you.
Should be less than a £250 all in and it’s fine for a startup venture.
If branding is particularly important you could get a designer and have something custom built. Even that doesn’t have to be expensive for a brochureware web site.
jagnet said:
Lots of stuff….
Hard to tell, but reading between the lines, I guess you’re not a fan?OP said they were a technophobe, I didn’t understand over half your post, so what chance have we got of selecting a suitable supplier when everyone talks technobabble.
Could you do the OP a favour and recommend a provider that in your opinion would do a good job?
jagnet said:
StevieBee said:
Shnozz said:
1. Basic Website to include email (<5 email addresses required) - no functionality required other than a few pages displaying services. Non-transactional.
I've used Namesco a few times. They provide the domain, email addresses, hosting and a built-it-yourself website editor which is reasonably intuitive. But if you get stuck, they'll build it for you for £400 or thereabout.So long as your customers all have super fast broadband, don't have any kind of accessibility requirement, and aren't overly fussed about finding you in the search results then I guess that's not a problem.
Otherwise, no. Just, no.
12MB of resources to fully load their demo restaurant desktop template homepage. If that was a person they'd be classed as morbidly obese and having to be craned out of their home into the back of an oversized ambulance. That page should absolutely not be any more than 1MB and more like 500KB, including any custom web fonts and cached JS and CSS for subsequent pages.
The Mobile version is still over 4MB. Hmm 8MB difference - that immediately suggests to me that there's a YouTube video embedded on the desktop page without using a façade. Ah yes, the purely decorative video next to opening times is actually a YouTube video set to autoplay. Great, 8MB of bloat for what? To distract the customer from the important information next to it? Great bit of design work there.
Over 200 HTML validation errors. Not just warnings, but actual errors. I can't even begin to imagine how little knowledge of HTML it requires to get 200 validation errors in one page. So why then are they choosing to use super-fussy "you'd better know what you're doing" XHTML, instead of more forgiving HTML? I have absolutely no idea. I doubt they do either. That's a very odd choice and usually indicates that somebody copy-pasted the doctype declaration without understanding what they copy-pasted. That the page renders at all is testament to the forgiving nature of modern browsers.
Accessibility failures - basic level A failures. Not AAA, or AA, but single A. The most basic "please don't sue my company for having an inaccessible website" level of all. And they even fail that.
Let's try adjusting the browser font size because you know, maybe my eyesight isn't what it used to be. It's a good test to see exactly what regard the site designer has for anybody with less than perfect vision. Result: no difference at all. None whatsoever. Because font size is set in px and not rem or em. That's a great big "f*** you" to anybody that isn't blessed with perfect vision. If I had a restaurant, I'm not sure that's the message I'd be wanting to send out to my older customers.
Semantic HTML? No, of course not. Div soup and late 90s era style mixed with HTML. Separation of concerns? Good grief no. They can't even structure their headings correctly so why would we expect anything more. Another "f*** you" to anybody that isn't viewing the website on a screen (which includes search engines).
But you know, maybe their Lighthouse scores will be OK. After all, they go out of their way to tell us how fast their sites are and how important that is for your SEO:
namesco said:
Our Website Builder also makes Google happy because it's super-fast. Site speed is a key ranking factor, so not only do your visitors enjoy a great user experience, you’ll also get better search engine results - it’s a win, win!
Let's take a look at this "win, win" by testing Lighthouse on their mobile view:
Oh dear, oh dear. I'd call that "lose, lose". I've seen worse, but not by much.
And finally, just for the giggles, what happens if you visit this template demo with Javascript disabled? Oh, no restaurant menu for you to look at. Because loading images and text now depends entirely on Javascript? Since when did that become a good idea? You'll have to guess what's on the menu. It's at least consistent because there's no mobile navigation menu either. Pfft, who needs one of them?
This would be funny if there weren't real people and their businesses being taken for a ride by garbage like this. It's cheap for a reason. But how much is it really costing? How many customers aren't finding you because it's crippling your SEO? How many customers are giving up waiting for your site to load and going to your competitors instead? How many can't actually read or navigate your website? How much are you now having to spend on Google ads to compensate for this crap? You don't know, because those lost customers sure aren't going to tell you.
I'll be honest, I haven't the foggiest what all that means. All I know is that I've been using them for three years and encountered no issues at all. They answer the phone and and helpful when needed. Never had the site fail or anyone say they can't access it or it's slow.... and it's crammed with images and video. Some of the design options are limited, granted.
That said, I don't attract business via SEO. It's more a destination I point people to. And it's not my main business site. If I were looking for SEO based enquiries, I'd probably commission a bespoke site as I did with my main business.
https://www.stephenwbates.com
Do your worst!
StevieBee said:
quite like that 
instant thought though - there appears to be a menu of the types of photography you do on the front banner - but not able to click on them - and they don't have equivalents under your menu structure - so a bit frustrating...
but some amazing photos!
thepritch said:
Hard to tell, but reading between the lines, I guess you’re not a fan?
Not so much One day I'll be mildly surprised with the quality of a website created using one of these DIY website builders, maybe.Yes, you'll have something that you can call a website at the end of it. Will it be any good? Hard for the customer to determine if they don't know what they should be looking at. Will it matter? For most companies, yes, more than likely.
thepritch said:
OP said they were a technophobe, I didn’t understand over half your post, so what chance have we got of selecting a suitable supplier when everyone talks technobabble.
There's not really any getting around it; a website is a technical thing. Not easy if you're a technophobe because you now have to trust a company's marketing department and salespeople to level with you. Nah, it'll be fine.Unfortunately, paying more isn't necessarily a guarantee of getting better either. Paying less? Well, good luck.
OK, if your budget is super super tight then yes, any website is better than no website. Everyone starts from somewhere and if other options are out of reach I'm not going to criticise anyone for that. But if you're using a DIY website builder, just be aware that they are fundamentally compromised by 1) the need to be user-friendly for someone with no technical knowledge, and 2) the need to compete with similar offerings on price, quantity of templates available, etc. That all conflicts with the cost of producing a technically proficient website. Since their target market is not going to judge the end result on technical proficiency, resources are not going to get spent on that.
Unfortunately, search engines do judge your website on its technical qualities. Braille and screen readers do too. None of them really care how nice your stock photos are, or your choice of font, or whether you went for the light blue or green colour theme. Ctrl + U (on a PC) - that's what they're seeing.
No-code tools designed for DIY use, using templates designed using (mostly) no-code tools. The HTML that makes up the page doesn't stand a chance.
Also be aware that your website isn't a standalone entity with these DIY site builders. There's no downloading your site as a zip file and moving it to another provider. Mettr customers found this out the hard way earlier in the year when the company went into administration. A lot of small businesses suddenly discovered that their website was about to get shut down and no, you can't have a backup copy of it to take elsewhere. Months on I know of some businesses that still have an emergency splash page up whilst waiting for their new sites to be built.
thepritch said:
Could you do the OP a favour and recommend a provider that in your opinion would do a good job?
You could do worse than go through the PH computers sub-forum and contact any of the web development company owning PHers that regularly post in there on matters to do with websites. StevieBee said:
So, you're on the fence with Namesco then?
I think this is why I never was any good at poker.StevieBee said:
Amazing photos, which would lift any website. Genuinely, very impressive.I still broke the website on my first attempt though:
I'd contact you to let you know, but the top nav links aren't working for me now either.
(Right, just to make it clear, these issues are obviously not criticising you - you can only work with what the platform gives you)
Homepage:
HTML validation errors: 195
You've actually got <font> elements on the page. It's been a while since I saw one in the wild; very retro. Deprecated for HTML5 of course.
Accessibility - WCAG Level A & AA errors (automated test only):
- Images without alt text
- Non-unique element IDs
- Empty headings
- Colour contrast doesn't meet minimum requirements
All your client logos are meaningless if you can't see the image. A screen reader just reads each one out as "clickable link".
It's the same for your gallery pages. All those amazing photos that could do so well in image searches but no alt text. Nothing to describe the photos. I'd like to see each of those inside a <figure> element, adding a <figcaption> for visible descriptive text, plus an alt attribute on the <img> itself. That'll start to get Google excited. That's SEO gold right there.
Any height and width attributes on those gallery images currently? Nah, of course not. System says no can't do that.
Google Lighthouse scores (3rd attempt - none of them managed to complete without the warning at the bottom):
Again, I've seen worse, but they're not great either and I don't know if its failure to finish is harming or flattering your scores. There's just so much unnecessary Javascript driving the page, much of it designed to improve page load times, ironically. Sure, it makes those Lighthouse scores for Desktop look better, but wow do you end up bloating the page overall and you are going to pay for that on a throttled connection with a less powerful mobile device (exactly how Google measures it). 5MB of resources for a simple homepage. That's 10 times the size it needs to be.
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