Ownership of the site and code

Renting a website or owning it

Many small business websites do not really belong to their owners. They are built on subscription platforms where, if you stop paying, the site disappears. Or an agency built them and keeps the code, the hosting and sometimes even the domain, so any change, however small, goes through them.

That dependency is not noticeable in the first year. It shows when you want to switch provider, when the fee goes up or when the person looking after your site stops replying. That is when you discover that what you thought was yours was really a rental.

At Webmake we work the other way round. You pay once to build the site and the site is yours: the code, the content, the design and the domain.

What is yours

When the project ends we hand over every credential and the clean source code. The website price is a fixed one-off payment: there are no mandatory fees to keep it.

"Clean" means the code is organised and free of closed parts only we know how to handle. Any professional with web development experience can open it, understand it and keep working on it.

No closed platforms

We code every site to measure instead of assembling it on visual builders or templates with dozens of plugins. Besides making the site load much faster, this avoids the dependencies that tie you to a provider: there is no licence to renew to keep the site running and no proprietary panel without which it cannot be edited.

We also keep the site dependent on as few third-party services as possible. Every external service is one more account to maintain, a cost that can change and a part that can fail.

Maintenance with no lock-in

Maintenance is optional and billed month to month. You can pause or cancel it whenever you want with a message or from your client area, with no penalties.

We would rather you stay because the service is worth it, not because a contract stops you leaving. That is why the first month of any paid plan is free when you build a new site: so you can try it before deciding.

How to take the site elsewhere

If one day you decide someone else should look after your site, the process is simple because you already have everything you need. You ask us from the client area and we help make the handover orderly, without the site going down during the switch.

Common questions