Nowadays, there are many roads to make a website.

If you don’t know how to code and don’t want to learn, you can pick one of the no-code options like: Carrd, Webflow or Squarespace.

If you would like to have more control and want to learn how to code, you can learn at one online course like Treehouse, Skillshare or Udemy.

Lastly, if you rather have someone professional make it for you, you know what to do.

Well… since you’re asking… maybe? If you’ve done it, be proud of it. Surely, it can be better, but so do many other websites even when done by a team of experienced professionals. There’s a never-ending stream of opportunities for improvement and optimisation on any website.

To evaluate how well a website is working start by looking for it on Google (just type: site:your-site-name.com). If you have any analytics tracking check to find how visitors use it. What’s the main objective for your website? Selling things? Getting leads? If 10% of the visitors do one of those actions, I would say it’s working pretty well already. Otherwise, something somewhere along the conversion funnel might be leaking too much, as in, people are might be getting distracted or just not interested enough.

If you need help to figure it out, get a Website Review or just get in touch.

Assuming your internet access is not to blame, there may be many reasons for a slow website. Nowadays any good hosting provider is fast enough, so the slowdown usually comes from things in the website: too large assets (images, video, music), render-blocking third-party scripts (eg: social media plugins, chat plugins, analytics), render-blocking style sheets (CSS) or slow synchronous server processes.

Use a tool like PageSpeed Insights or the Lighthouse Test to find out what’s wrong. If you need help to understand the test results or someone to actually speed up your website, get a Website Review or just get in touch.

Also, if you want to confirm your internet connection is as quick as expected, do a quick Speedtest.

There could be a few reasons. The content on your website might not be relevant enough for the topic you searched for. The competition might be too strong and push your website too far down the search results. Your website might not be giving the correct instructions for search engines to understand and process the content.

To find out the reason, start by asking Google to show you only the results it has listed from your website. For this, type in the search box: site:your-site-name.com. If nothing comes up, Google might not even know your website exists yet. Next step is to use the Search Console and register your website (and sitemap.xml) to learn and monitor how Google understands your website.

If you still can’t get it to work, I can do a Website Review and fix it for you.

As with most things in life, it depends. I can answer with another question: "How much does a car cost? Or even a small house?". The answer wouldn’t be too far off.

BUT… that being said, some of the usual costs are: design and build, content production (eg: images, text, video), domain name(s) and hosting. Depending on your skills, you can do it all by yourself, or have someone handle all or some of the pieces.

Let’s assume someone else will do it for you. Design, build and content can be done as a one-off by an agency or by one or more freelancers. As a ballpark figure, a custom starter website professionally done, can easily land somewhere between £2,500 and £10,000. From the initial meeting to publishing online, the entire process usually takes from 1-3 months to deliver. Domain names and hosting are (usually) packaged together costing less than £50 per year.

If you need a freelancer to get it done, I’m here for you.

I only started listening to podcasts about 3-4 years ago. Before that, I would much prefer to listen to music or audiobooks, especially while commuting. Since then podcasts exploded and everyone seems to have a podcast now. I listen regularly to a few, some in Portuguese and some in English.

The Portuguese ones are ask.tm, Maluco Beleza and Ar Livre.

Some of the English ones are Conan O’Brien needs a friend, Reply All, Joe Rogan Experience, Invisible Forces, StartUp, Rework, Masters of Scale, The Knowledge Project and Indie Hackers.

If I had to choose a favourite podcast episode, it would be The Case of The Missing Hit from Reply All.

Most books I read are non-technical. I already have to read plenty of technical articles and documentation to be up to date with my tools of the trade, so outside work, I prefer other things. Things that shape up my thinking and understanding of people and everything around us.

I’ve been more into self-help books, mainly psychology and philosophy related, but lately, I’m more into biographies and, being a dad, also plenty of parenting books. Check my reading list for my book recommendations.

This is something I actually get asked frequently, so I created a page to try and address all topics about the tools I use and recommend.

More than enough. Enough pays the bills. The extra pays for everything else.

Unless you’re selling something that does not exist in the market, you can find how much others charge. That being said, it still depends on the context. Bills vary a lot based on location alone, which influences the base value. So the minimum you charge for the service will need to cover your bills plus enough for you to feel comfortable with the value.

To calculate the absolute minimum, sum up a month-worth of your living costs (rent, bills, food, transportation, insurance, etc) then split by 30 to get your daily living cost. Multiply this by 1.5 to allow a good margin (50%) for taxes. This is your daily base rate.

To calculate how much you should charge for a service, just multiply the daily base rate by the estimated number of days the service will take. Never charge less than this.

For a better lifestyle, do the math again but instead of just living costs, adjust it to how much you’ll need every month to live a good life. Within reason.