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The stuff nobody
explains to you
Plain-English explanations of the things clients get told to sort out without ever being told what they are. No jargon for its own sake, no padding to hit a word count, and no advice I would not give a paying client — because most of this is what I tell paying clients.
Written by Alec Willits, and kept current. If something here's wrong or out of date, tell me and I'll fix it.
Domains, hosting & DNS
The plumbing nobody explains to you until it breaks. What you're actually paying for, who holds which piece, and how to work out where a problem lives.
Web host vs. domain registrar
Two different companies selling two different things, routinely confused because one company often sells you both.
8 min readWhat website maintenance actually buys you
Four jobs get sold under one word, and two plans at the same price can contain completely different work. Here is how to tell them apart.
7 min readWho actually owns your website?
Paying for a website and owning one are different things, and the gap only shows up when the person who built it stops replying.
12 min readRegistering a domain and setting up hosting
The whole process end to end, the order to do it in, and the traps — nearly all of which are commercial and not technical.
9 min readDNS, and how to read your DNS table
Every row in that intimidating table does one job. Here's what each record type means and which ones break things.
Search & performance
How Google decides what to show, what it measures, and which of the things people worry about actually move the needle.
DIY SEO for a local business
Most search advice is written for blogs and online stores. A local service business needs a much shorter list, and the best item on it isn't your website.
10 min readGoogle E-E-A-T, explained
Not a ranking factor, not a score, and not something you can install a plugin for — but it does describe what Google is trying to reward.
9 min readCore Web Vitals, in plain English
Three numbers that measure how a page feels to use: how fast it shows up, how fast it answers, and whether it holds still.
11 min readHow to read a PageSpeed report
Every number the report gives you, what it means in plain language, and a real measured example of each — including some genuinely bad ones.
5 min readFive website habits that look fine and work against you
A site can look finished and still be hard for search engines, screen readers and phones to use. Five habits I see often, each with a check you can run yourself.
Building & maintaining
Decisions that look small at the start of a project and turn expensive in year three.
Do you actually need a website?
Often the honest answer is not yet. What a Facebook page really covers, the one gap it leaves, and the free thing worth doing before you pay anybody.
9 min readHow long does it take to build a website?
3 to 5 weeks for a small site, longer for a big one. The useful part is what makes that number move, and almost all of it sits on your side.
10 min readShould you build your own website?
Sometimes, genuinely, yes. But the reason DIY sites underperform isn't the one everybody assumes — and it's not a lack of time.
8 min readWhat actually makes a website slow
It's almost never the thing people blame. A short, honest ranking of the real causes, in the order they usually bite.
8 min readWhat a website builder won't let you fix
I read every page of a client's builder site to find out why the SEO work wasn't landing. The problem wasn't the work. It was how little of the page I was allowed to change.
5 min readRedesign or rebuild?
A quote that says redesign can mean updating the site you have or starting again from nothing. Here's how I decide which one a site needs.
Why this exists
Because "just point the DNS at us" isn't an instruction
Most of these started as emails. A client would ask why their email had stopped, or why the new site was live for me and not for them, or what the difference was between the two companies billing them every year — and I'd write it out properly instead of fobbing them off with a link.
After enough of those, it made more sense to write them once and write them well. If you are here because you're trying to understand something before you make a decision, that's exactly who these are for. You don't have to hire anyone to read them.
Would rather not learn all this?
Entirely reasonable. Tell me what you're dealing with and I'll give you a straight answer about what it needs — within one business day.