I need to deal with something awkward before I tell you what I've built.
I spend a lot of this blog telling people to own their website instead of renting one from a builder. My cheapest custom build is £900. Which leaves a gap, and I know exactly who lives in it, because they email me: the salon owner two years into a Wix subscription she can't edit, the electrician whose website is a Facebook page, the new accountant who has quoted her own fees more honestly than any agency ever quoted hers.
Telling those people "save up for custom" while they hand a builder £20 a month was starting to feel like bad advice. So I built the thing I'd actually recommend at that budget: website templates for £99, one per trade, that you own outright.
Each template is a complete, finished website for one specific business. Not a theme with lorem ipsum in it. A worked example with pages, copy patterns, pricing layouts and enquiry forms already decided, so your job is typing your details over someone else's.
There are five:
They're real HTML and CSS files. When you buy one, the download lands in your inbox and the files land on your computer. That sentence matters more than it sounds, and I'll come back to it.
A Wix or Squarespace plan that connects your own domain runs £15 to £30 a month once the first-year discount wears off. Over three years that's £540 to £1,080, and at the end you own nothing. Stop paying and the site is gone. I've written before about what websites actually cost and why builders don't work for you, and the pattern is always the same: the monthly fee is rent, and rent never ends.
The template over the same three years: £99 once, a domain at about £10 a year, hosting free on Netlify. Call it £129 all in. The gap between those numbers is a paid-for holiday, and on the template side of it you still own the site.
The bit I'm proudest of. Open any page from your own computer and an editor appears in the corner of the page itself.
Click any text and type over it. Click any photo and choose one from your computer; it's resized for the web automatically, so pictures straight off your phone are fine. There's a colours panel for the accent and the background, and the matching darker shades follow along automatically so you can't accidentally break the palette. Then you download the page, and that's your website, edited.
No account. No subscription that the editing is locked behind. No code. The editor is part of the files you bought, which means it keeps working in ten years whether or not I'm still around. Try getting that promise out of a website builder.
You, if most of this is true: your budget is honestly under a few hundred pounds, you run one of those five kinds of business or something close, and you can follow written instructions for an afternoon. That afternoon is real, and I'd rather tell you now: you'll register a domain, set up free hosting and connect the enquiry form, with a launch checklist walking you through each step.
Not you, if: you need bookings taken, stock sold or anything else a static site can't do (that's a proper build, from £900). Or the afternoon of setup fills you with dread, in which case keep reading, the next section is yours. And if you're still working out whether you need a website at all, start here instead.
New alongside the templates: Template Hosting, from £25 a month. I set the template up with your details, connect your domain, do the SEO groundwork and keep the site live. The template is included free.
Before you point out that a monthly fee sounds suspiciously like the renting I've been warning you about: the difference is what happens when you leave. Cancel a builder and your site evaporates. Cancel Template Hosting and I hand you the complete folder, which runs anywhere, because it was yours from day one. You're paying for my time, never for permission to exist.
"You bang on about owning your website. Why would I pay you for a template?"
Because this is the £99 version of the same argument. Owning your site was never about how much you spent; it's about whether the thing you paid for is yours. These templates are the cheapest way I know to get a fast site, built properly for your trade, that nobody can take off you or re-price next year.
And they're not generic. Each one was designed from scratch for its trade, with different fonts, different layouts and different jobs to do. The accountant kit leads with fees because that's what wins an accountant clients. The photographer kit barely has any words because the photographs are the argument. A general-purpose theme can't make those calls; that's the custom in them.
Have a look at the five templates. If you're not sure whether yours is the right business for one, email me at hello@madebyfederica.co.uk and describe what you do. If the honest answer is "don't buy one", that's the answer you'll get.
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Whether you need a full build or just a second opinion, send me a line and I'll tell you honestly what I'd do.
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