Great question. We don’t offer a free trial to the general public, but under certain circumstances we’d be happy to provide an educational trial for beginners, students, and non-profits to get their toes wet. Please contact us for more information.

You can, but we would prefer you didn’t. It may only seem like 30-60 minutes to you, but to us, it’s a large chunk of time we could be using to make progress.

We prefer client reviews to be initiated from our end, when we feel we’ve reached a substantial milestone. In the interim, we prefer any feedback or additional input take place solely via email or our ticketing system. Not only does this help us keep all communication organized, it also helps us work faster. We can skim an email with change requests far faster than we can listen to someone tell us what they want done. This may seem odd, but to give an analogy, if you’ve ever had to call your internet service provider for help with an issue and they had to walk you through the process and the call took way longer than expected, it’s like that. If you feel we’re misunderstanding what you’re wanting after a revision is done, THEN we will happily impromptu Zoom/call for clarification.

Yes, you can upgrade your hosting package at any time by visiting your Client Area Dashboard. Please note, you can upgrade at any time. You cannot downgrade services yourself. If you need to downgrade, please submit a ticket.

Yes! Despite RAD Websites building websites from scratch exclusively with Divi, we can help you refine websites made with the following WordPress builders:

• Elementor
• Oxygen
• Breakdance
• Bricks
• Beaver Builder
• WPBakery
• YooTheme
• Gantry
• and others…

Our skillset is best with Divi, but that doesn’t mean we’re incapable with other builders. Though we prefer Divi Builder, we’re quite versed with most popular builders. Contact us for a quote with your project. All website refinement is billed by the hour.

We will provide a contract for any web design or re-design services we provide.

Contracts cover the total estimated cost of the website, estimated time to completion, total number of revisions, payment amount and frequency, what to expect, and more. It’s written to be very easy-to-read and understand, no legaleze, no technical mumbo-jumbo.

WordPress Hosting Plans do not require a contract, but they do require that you abide by our Terms of Service.

Great question! Here’s the best answer we can give:

There are many aspects to SEO. There’s Technical SEO, On-page SEO, Authoritative SEO, and off-page SEO.

Technical SEO ensures your website is functional, no broken links, good speed, high accessibility, among other things.

On-Page SEO is your content and how well it’s written, whether the user gets the information they were searching for.

Authoritative SEO is your sites authority ranking overall for the type of content you’re delivering. For example, if your site is mainly about butterflies and suddenly you write an article on how to fix your refrigerator, that article won’t rank well because you’ve not proven to be an authority on refrigerator repair.

Off-Page SEO is basically how traffic is driven TO your site from methods outside of search engines, such as backlinks from authoritative websites, social media links, news outlets, etc.

SEO is an entirely different ballgame than design and development. While we do our best to ensure all aspects of technical SEO are covered, and design with on-page SEO in mind, we have no control over Authoritative or Off-Page SEO, nor do we have any control over the content you put on your site after we’ve finished. We provide you with tools to help you understand the SEO of your site and how users are interacting with it, but we don’t have the desire to get into the trenches of the SEO world. In short, we do NOT offer SEO as a service.

We have a pretty good grasp on all aspects of SEO, but zero interest in doing full-service SEO ourselves. We recommend finding an SEO specialist online. We’ll write an article about what to look for in an “SEO Expert” and link it here when we’re done.

Yes, RAD Websites offers an affiliate program. We believe wholeheartedly in the 80/20 rule. In fact, Mark abides by this even when acquiring web design clients for Katelyn. The way our affiliate program works is this: If you find us a new client, and that client signs up for either Web Design or Hosting services, you will receive 20% of the net profit. If we design them a brand new site, you get 20% of the net profit. If they sign up for hosting services, you get 20% residually of their hosting fees until they cancel services. Pretty sweet, right?

Excellent question. We offer free WordPress Migrations from most major platforms. In the event your platform doesn’t support instantly porting out, there will be a $35 fee for the site transfer. We will inform you of this fee ahead of time if your site doesn’t qualify for a free transfer.

RAD Websites Hosting
If you’re unhappy with RAD Websites hosting at any point during your 30-day Money Back Guarantee period, simply cancel service and contact us for a full refund. PLEASE NOTE: We cannot refund the cost of domains purchased through our registrar. This is industry standard for all webhosts.

RAD Web Design and Development
If you’re unhappy with the direction your new RAD designed site is going, please contact us so we can revisit our notes and objectives. We want nothing more than you to be so thrilled with your website that you tell a friend to check us out. If we’re unable to come to an agreement, we will happily provide a refund in accordance with your contract.

Thank you for asking, this is a great question and we’re going to outline it below. Understanding our design process will help minimize confusion and maximize our output.

First, we do a client-discovery call. We have a spreadsheet we use to fill out important details for each site we create.

Next, we create a password-protected site according to the discovery call. In order, we create:

1. The desktop site first
2. The tablet version second
3. The mobile version third

The site is password protected so it’s not indexed by search engines while still in the development phase.

During our design process, we will reach design / development milestones and request a “client review.” We will send you a link to the staging site for you to review our progress. We ask during this time that you provide any feedback on the direction your website is heading. You might see some grammatical errors during these reviews; feel free to let us know about them, but rest assured they won’t slip by before the site goes public.

ALL initial client reviews are for the DESKTOP “Full Featured” version first. We need to make sure that all elements you want to include on your site are on the desktop Version. After we’ve completed the desktop version, we do the responsive (tablet / mobile) versions. The reason for this is because every change request required is carried out on the desktop version, and once the desktop version is considered “finished”, we have to re-design the site for Table and Mobile breakpoints (screen sizes). Looking at the tablet and mobile versions before they’re being worked on does nothing but add extra worry to your plate and extra work to ours. Please trust the process, we’ve done this a few dozen times.

Once you’ve completed any client review and provided us feedback, we will continue refining the site until we reach another milestone. This client review -> redesign / refine process ensures that we’re building the site in accordance with your vision.

After you’ve run out of things to add / change / remove / refine for the desktop version, we will first verify the site’s uniformity across most popular browsers: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Apple Safari, Opera Browser, and Brave Browser.

The next stage of our process involves adjusting any elements for consistency across all browsers, This includes testing all functionality of the site. Contact forms, menu systems, all links on every page, any automations that were put in place, affiliate systems, payment systems, etc.

When all functionality has been tested without issue, we will then go through and tweak the site for tablet and mobile responsiveness. This means the site, with the same code, will work across Desktop, Tablet, and Mobile devices and provide a consistent user experience regardless of the platform the site is viewed on.

We will send client reviews during the tablet and mobile responsive refinement phase, as well.

Once the site is completed, we will remove password protection so the site can be indexed by search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and your site will officially be live.

Pretty darn fast. We aim for 95+ on all Google PageSpeed Insights Scores for both Mobile and Desktop, and an A+ ranking on GTMetrix. We keep plug-in usage to a minimum per site, and use WP Rocket and Asset Cleanup to optimize every page for the best user experience. With every site design being different, we can’t promise we’ll hit 95+ on everything. Some sites will have way more content than others. That said, we will definitely do our best!

It depends on how complex your site is. We’ve created complete websites in as little as a day with full creative freedom, and some websites have taken us six months with full custom PHP development. On average, however, most websites we do can be completed a week or two if no custom development is needed. Once we do a discovery call with you, we’ll be able to better estimate how long your particular web design / development project will take.

It’s just me (Mark) and Katelyn, for now 😉 We do have per-diem contractors on hand to assist us with the following:

• Professional Photography beyond what Mark is capable of
• Professional Videography
• Aerial (Drone) Photography and Videography
• Premium SEO Services

If we’re unable to provide a service for something web related, we will refer you to someone that we trust can deliver to our high standards.

NOTE: for instances where we get an influx of helpdesk tickets, we do have supporting staff at our sister company, RAD Computers, that can assist us with technical questions and issues.

Designing a website involves many different factors, such as the purpose of the site, how many pages, what functionality it should have, whether professional photos are needing to be taken, and more. To simplify the process, we have created this Website Design Estimator for our prospective clients to get an idea of how much a website would cost for their specific situation.

We have three varieties of options:

1. Host the site with us and manage it yourself.
   • This option starts $10 per month, same as if you designed it yourself.
   • Most websites will fall into the $10/month category.
   • Managing the website yourself means taking over:
     • WordPress Core and Plug-In Updates
     • Backups
     • Software Licensing Agreements and renewal costs
     • Software-as-a-Service renewal costs (Booking calendars and Zapier automations, for example)
   • We will always tell  you everything you need to know about the costs of running your website so you can make an informed decision
2. Host the site with us, and have us manage it.
   • We offer three managed hosting plans:
     • Silver Managed – $50/month and includes domain renewal, hosting, plug-in renewals, SaaS licensing, backups, automation management, updates and maintenance
     • Gold Managed – $100/month, same as silver, but calculated for larger sites with more renewal costs, CDN, and other things most local businesses wouldn’t need
     • Platinum Managed – Starting at $150+/mo, same as gold, but for sites that require constant monitoring and upkeep, failover, etc. Most of these would be enterprise websites
3. Migrate it to the webhost of your choosing.
   • Same as option 1. We will not manage a site that is not hosted by us. You will pay your new webhost directly, and contact us if/when something goes wrong. We will bill you by the hour for any maintenance/upkeep/repairs needed.

If you need better photos to bring your website from good to great, you have a few options:

• Take better photos yourself
• Hire a professional photographer
• Use licensed stock images from a source like iStockPhoto or Pexels
• Ask about our Photography package

We do offer photography for websites on a case-by-case basis. We will come out to you with our cameras, lightboxes, and lighting umbrellas ready.

If you’re not in the Phoenix, Arizona or Tucson, Arizona area, we’re unable to offer our photography package; we recommend checking Yelp for professional photographers that specialize in the types of photos you need.

Great question. Content Management Systems have evolved drastically over the past twenty years. We can work on websites using any of the following CMS systems:

• WordPress
• Joomla
• Drupal
• Wix
• SquareSpace
• Shopify
• GoDaddy Builder
• Weebly
• and others… these are just the most popular ones.

While Wix, SquareSpace, and Shopify are not installable modules like WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal, they are still considered Content Management Systems. They’re database-driven SaaS (Software as a Service) website builders. Same with GoDaddy and Weebly.

While we are versed in several CMS systems, we prefer to work exclusively in WordPress when we design a website from scratch. We will not design a website for you on any other platform.

Great question. We believe in complete transparency and keeping our clients informed.

Our preferred WordPress design stack for most websites includes:

• Divi Theme Builder for site design
  • RAD Websites Child Theme for customization
• Divi Pixel for modularity
• Divi Engine’s Mega Menu for desktop mega menus
• Divi Engine’s Divi Mobile for mobile menu customization
• Gravity Forms
• Image Comply for image alt tagging for the visually impaired
• (Custom CSS)

For site optimization, we use:

• WP Rocket for website speed optimization
• Imagify for smart image compression
• Asset CleanUp for selective plugin loading per page

For custom functionality and development, we use:

• Advanced Custom Fields Pro
• Divi Engine’s Divi Machine
• Better Search Replace
• XYZ Scripts with Custom PHP
• Zapier / Pabbly

For SEO, we use:

• The SEO Framework for SEO
• Aura Heatmap
• Site Kit by Google

For eCommerce, we use:

• WooCommerce
• Divi Engine’s:
  • Body Commerce
  • Machine Accounts
  • Divi Membership
• Zapier / Pabbly
• MailChimp or Constant Contact

For Security, we use:

• All-In-One WP Security and Firewall
  • We used to use “WordFence”, but due to issues with Zapier automation, we have switched to AIO WPSAF as it works better with Zapier and Pabbly

Other Stuff:

• iStockPhoto for stock images
• Midjourney for AI-generated images
• Business Hours Indicator Pro for Service Business websites
• Tickera for event / ticket sales websites
• AffiliateWP for Affiliate-enabled websites
• Sonaar for Musician Sites
• Smash Balloon Social Full Stack for any sites that require social media feed automation

Please Note: Unless otherwise noted, all of our software is licensed to us (RAD Websites), and any website we design using these licenses is free to continue using our Agency licensing under the EULA set by each licensing entity so long as the website is still managed by RAD Websites. In the event a website is to be self-managed or managed by another entity other than RAD Websites, all licensing for that site will be terminated in accordance with the EULA of that license.

Fantastic question! Previously, we were using Siteground.com exclusively for our web hosting services. We thought, and still think, they are a wonderful hosting platform. However, there were some quirks to managing a web design company that Siteground was not accommodating to. Those things were:

• Streamlined Site setup
  • This is the biggest reason. Whenever we needed to onboard a new client, it took about an hour just to get to the point where we could start designing. We had to manually install all plugins we were going to utilize by hand, update them, tweak all the settings, etc.
• Automated billing / service provisioning / service termination
  • There was zero automation for this. We were using a 3rd-party for invoicing and starting/terminating services manually
• Lack of resource monitoring
  • We couldn’t monitor client usage easily at a glance. The data wasn’t presented in a “web host” friendly way. This made it difficult to make decisions on scaling.
• Weird caching issues
  • There’s no way to stop a site from being dynamically cached on Siteground servers. This is extremely frustrating as some plugins don’t behave as expected with “Dynamic Cache” being permanently enabled. We needed a platform that allowed us to toggle each caching function on or off per site
• Wanting more granular control
  • While Siteground had just about everything we wanted, there were some things that were lacking with the platform that we needed. The ability to create custom deployment automations was a big one. We wanted to be able to deploy a site, and the very act of deploying that site would set off a chain reaction of Welcome emails, informative how-to’s, etc. We haven’t finished building those automations yet, but we have the ability to now. On Siteground, we had none of that.
• Inability to scale
  • We’re a business. We want to scale. Offering service alone with no automated way to make sales online was holding back our growth. We designed our hosting packages to competitively priced and permanent. No surprise price increases, no surprise fees, nothing. What you see is what you get and what you see is what you pay. We like it that way.

Don’t get us wrong, for the average user, Siteground is a steal (at least for the first year). We’re less expensive long-term, faster, and constantly improving our services according to user demand and feedback.

Ahhh we love this question. Yes, we are most likely more expensive than other hosts, but only for the first year. We’ve done quite a bit of homework on our competitors, like:

• GoDaddy
• SiteGround
• Hostinger
• Host Gator
• Blue Host
• etc.

We researched the top 10 most popular webhosts and found they all do the same thing: they lure you in with a sweet sign-up deal, and then as soon as the renewal comes around, WHAM! They stick it to your wallet. There’s TONS of complaints about this practice on sites like reddit.com where people are complaining about their web host “raising prices” on them. A lot of our larger competitors are also smoking hot dumpster fires when it comes to server speed and/or stability.

And while a lot of hosts have raised their prices over the years, a lot of people are just not realizing that their “sweet pricing” is only good until their first renewal. Heck, unless you sign up for a year or more on most providers, the hosting cost per month is generally higher than ours across the board for each tier.

Here at RAD Websites, we decided we didn’t want to participate in the deceptive practices that other hosts put their clients through. We thought long and hard about our pricing model, accounted for employee growth, infrastructure expansion and maintenance, and more, and we’ve settled on the prices we have now for the long haul. We strive to provide faster servers, better support, and better transparent pricing until the cold death of the universe.

If we DO ever decide to raise our prices, any current clients will be grandfathered into the pricing plan that was available when they signed up, for life. And if we ever lower our prices, EVERYONE will get the lower pricing. That’s just how we want to operate.

Our speed, efficiency, and knowledge runs deeps with WordPress. We want you to have the best website we can craft, and that means we stick with the tools we’re more proficient with.

If you’re adamant on having a website built on another platform, please contact us for a discovery call, so we can assess if what you need done is even possible on your preferred platform, and if so, what the cost would be.