A climate positive web designer

Hiring a freelancer web designer is often cheaper than going to an agency because they have less overheads. They are also usually more responsive as the client will have direct contact with the freelancer.

All freelancers will charge for projects slightly differently. I charge on a per project basis, so I would ask you to send me a brief outlining your requirements. That way I can see if we’ll be a good fit and if I believe I have the skills needed to bring your project to life. I can say that my prices for bespoke design & development typically start at around the £2,500 + VAT figure.

So I usually break the project into two payments. You pay the first 50% upfront as an initial kickoff invoice. The client pays the remaining 50% when they no longer require changes on the development server and the site is ready to go live.

Every web design project has different parts. A typical brochure website takes about 6 to 8 weeks to complete. A more complicated build or something eCommere based could be anywhere from 8 – 20 weeks depending on the size and how complex it is. For a rough breakdown of an average timeline please see the below table:

For the best possible beginning to your project, it’s always best that you have everything you need for hitting the ground running. Not having these ready is not a deal breaker; it can just make things take slightly longer.

• Branding – I’ll ask you to supply any brand guidelines you have before we begin. If you dont have any that’s not a problem, simply supplying your logo in an SVG format will suffice.
• Photography – If you have an image library I’ll ask to access to this, again if you don’t have this we can look at sourcing images for you from stock libraries like Shutterstock or Unsplash.
• Content If you have planned your content with sitemaps and documents for each page, that’s great! If not, I will ask for a simple content plan. This will show us what should go on each page. Then, we can use placeholder text like ‘lorem ipsum’ until you write the real content.

Yes. I always make sure that my websites are search engine friendly and follow all the latest best practices. I also pay close attention to Google’s Core Web Vitals to make sure the website is as fast as possible, this includes modern coding practices like using WebP/SVG imagery and if using a CMS caching plugins will be utilised to again improve the performance.

While I don’t offer web hosting directly, I do work with a couple of chosen providers whom I have worked with for the last 10 years. They are Kyrstal and Kinsta, neither of these is cheap but with web hosting you get what you pay for. If you want a site that’s secure, scalable and fast then you need to pay for a host that can offer you that.

WordPress is my CMS of choice and powers the majority of the websites that I build. Clients often like to use this as it’s open source (meaning it doesn’t require an expensive yearly licence to use) and it’s very easy to use. I also work with other PHP based CMS’s such as Craft & Statamic. For headless sites I typically work with Astro & Prismic.

I opted to use a brand rather than my name to set myself apart from the competition. The majority of other freelancers just use their names. I can’t honestly say why the name Lonely Pixel jumped out at me but after many domain searches it was the only one that stuck!