Websites built turnkey from scratch, no templates

The price was higher than what I had set aside, and at first I did not want to agree. A freelancer before them had promised a turnkey store for half the money, but before him I had two shop windows where the payment simply did not go through. For the first days it annoyed me that there was nothing to look at: they asked about stock and about where an order is supposed to land, and showed no mockups. Then it turned out half my enquiries were getting lost in DMs because I did not open them for weeks. I see all of them now. Edits go into the Telegram chat, a day or two and it is done.

Two London agencies quoted double and both wanted a January start. These ones started in November. I did not manage to defend the parallax on the case page — they talked me out of it, and rightly, because on a phone it would have been a mess. In fact the site never went down once during the raise and nothing surprising happened at the finish, although we fought with the analytics for one evening. Mail sent at 23:40 gets an answer within the hour, I checked three times.

I needed one page with booking, nothing cosmic. Three weeks, on budget. I cannot say how many bookings there are now — I still keep them in a notebook, the way I always did — but at night the phone finally stays quiet.

Aggregators took 15% commission even on the nights we had brought in ourselves from Instagram, and that annoyed us more than anything else. With our own booking the main fear was that it would break in the middle of the season. It has not, although for the first month I checked every request by hand. Guests say they find us on Google. We re-shot the photos twice, and that one was on us: the first set came out dark, and January has very little daylight. I change the holiday prices myself now, they taught me.

They costed the budget at the start and never changed it — probably the main thing I can say. I ordered the site to put a link to it in client contracts, and I am not ashamed of it. At weekends replies are slow, sometimes until Monday. I allow for that now, but it would have been useful to know in advance — nobody told me.

Forty sellers, payments reconciled in spreadsheets. For months I could not get a straight answer on what marketplace development costs — everywhere it was an MVP first, six months, then we see. Here they built a single cart with split payments in 18 weeks. I did not sleep before launch because I was afraid the money would go to the wrong sellers. The first year brought 8.2 million hryvnias in turnover, although that is certainly not down to the site alone. And one more thing: they worked out when it would pay off instead of how many hours it takes, and talked us out of a cashback we did not need yet.

I am in Manchester, so I braced for timezone problems and for having to explain everything twice. None of it happened — in Slack they answered faster than my local contractor. The store is in English and runs without hiccups. The one thing I can hold against them: the mailing list only came up in the third week, although I had asked for it from the start.

Half a year we argued over whether we needed a CRM or Excel, and we paid for three tools that do not talk to each other: deals in a spreadsheet, the owner without margin, the warehouse writing on WhatsApp. We launched, and for the first month my managers pretended nothing had changed, because the old way was more comfortable. The payment screen was rebuilt three times, and there the question is on them — nobody asked us how we work. Now from lead to shipment it is all in one window instead of three. Calls are recorded, and it finally came out which of my people had promised somebody a discount.

Bookings no longer get lost in messengers. The site holds the free slots itself and takes the deposit itself; the receptionists exhaled, because before they spent every evening rereading the chat. Honestly, online bookings did not grow right away, but at last I can see what we actually have.

I take half a star off not for the site but for the API documentation — I had to drag it out of them, and then we spent a week repairing the warehouse integration because they changed the statuses a week before the finish. On the other hand the budget did not grow: costed at the start, and four months later the total was exactly that. We came in with a spreadsheet holding all our cargo and I had no idea what a dashboard like this costs. People use it every day now, and there are noticeably fewer calls asking where my cargo is.

I am happy with the work, but I take a star off. The section about us was reworked many times; some of those edits were mine, some were not, everything just moved slowly. The price never changed, and I count that to their credit. The site is fast and enquiries came, although I still take them by email rather than in a proper system — we had not agreed on that, but it is bearable for now.

My old page would not let me show a portfolio properly, and that was my only complaint. Now people arrive ready to agree, having just opened the link. I spent a month and a half gathering photos and dragged the deadline along with me — there were no fines and no nerves from their side, and for that I am grateful. How any of it is written I do not know and do not look; the admin panel makes sense at a glance.

Enrolments grew in the very first month, although I cannot say how much of that is the site and how much is that we finally put the schedule in one place. It is the first site my students use on a phone without asking where the button is. Half a star because in the first week I could not find my own password in the admin area, and it took two videos before that was over.

Three thousand items in the catalogue and the server holds it. That is the part I am willing to sign for, because the two contractors before them broke on exactly this. Search is instant, and the sales reps no longer mail price spreadsheets. The interface is not beautiful, I asked for something else, but it does not affect speed, so I did not go to war over it.

I came in with the site needing to look expensive, and with a conversation in which I could not phrase half of it myself. They understood. There is animation, and it still loads fast — I did not believe that happens with motion. I did not like the first version of the home page, and they rebuilt it although I gave them no argument at all: I could not say what I wanted.

The 1C integration came up, and that is the reason we started any of this. Half a star off for the handover into the admin panel: it dragged on, I did not read the documents myself, but the person who walks you through the interface only turned up in the third week. The questions stopped once they sent a separate guide. All in all it is a working tool, and the warehouse no longer keeps its count in a notebook.

Patients from the site come every week, and I track it in a plain spreadsheet, so I can say that exactly. They gave real timelines, no tomorrow, and did not raise the price afterwards. Besides the site they also set up Google Business, and I think that is when we started showing up in search. Not everything in the admin panel is clear to me; for now I keep asking my colleagues.

We inherited an unfinished React app from a team that dropped the project halfway. They did not rewrite it from scratch and did not charge for one either — they took apart what was there and finished the dashboard we showed investors. Everyone else said not to touch somebody else’s code, so the fact that they agreed struck me as odd at the time. And one more thing: twice I was told that what I wanted was technically silly, and both times it turned out to be true.

Our budget is small and the organisation is nonprofit. They costed it honestly and even cut part of what I had asked for, because it does not bring donations in. That decision does not grow their own invoice, and I noticed it. There was no pressure to add something else. The half-week delay was on my side, waiting for a document from our accountant, and nobody once brought it up.

I change prices and stock myself, without a developer, and the project has already paid for itself on that alone. It used to take up my Monday evening. Demand here is seasonal and spikes in summer, and what matters is that the site does not fall over in the heat — so far it holds. I did not want a CRM at first, it struck me as something for office people, but they explained it without any talk of digital transformation.

Three stars, and my complaint is not about the site but about the handover. The work is quality and the team knows their stuff, but halfway through the project the manager changed and I re-explained things I had already said twice. The site turned out lovely and every question was closed. I think they have tightened that process since, because a friend of mine in March had nothing like that to say about the handover.

Six locations, six booking pages, one system. I was migrating off WordPress and the blog rankings in Google scared me most — they did the redirects and traffic did not dip, although our analyst would say it better than I can. There was other stuff too: two pages did not get approved at the first pass, and for a week I started quoting a different studio to compare. They did not take offence, they costed it again and showed where they are cheaper.

I ordered it to sell, not to look pretty. For the first weeks I regretted spending that much — until I saw the average cheque go up. I do not regret it now, although by the standards of our market it is a lot. I do not like long threads, they answer short, and for me that matters more than a nice call in Zoom.

My WooCommerce took forever to open on a phone. They replaced the front end and you feel it by hand, without any numbers. They wrote speed and SEO into the contract as a separate line — that is why I gave it to them and not to a freelancer asking half as much. The problem was on my side: for three weeks I could not hand over the domain access, and nobody turned it into a scandal.

We change the menu every few weeks and I do it myself — that was the one requirement I held on to. Table booking works, guests write that they choose us because of the photos, even though I shot them myself on a phone and thought they looked bad. The price stayed where it was, but I asked for the first menu layout to be redone twice.

Three weeks before the season, and I wrote to four studios — two said they physically could not make it. These ones took it. Bookings from the site tripled, and they showed analytics in a way where I can see which line the money comes from. My part of the story is bad: I delayed the tour photos and because of that we went live on the last night. Half my team are still getting used to the new admin, and that one is certainly not their fault.

They made the deadline and stayed with the amount we had agreed. The site is alive and brings orders. Small tweaks were answered the same day, even though I asked three times and the small stuff was my own fault.