# Frequently Asked Questions > Every question people ask, answered in one place: availability, what a website, app or business system costs, what you own at the end, AI and your data, Cyber Essentials and ISO 27001, SEO and GEO, and how to start a project. Canonical page: https://daveellis.dev/faq/ Made by Dave Ellis (Edinburgh, Scotland). Email: dave@daveellis.dev Last updated: 2026-11-12 Every frequently asked question and its answer, grouped by topic. ## Questions, answered properly. Every question people actually ask, grouped so you can find yours. Each answer is the same one you would get in an email, which is the point of writing them down. ## Working together ### Are you available for new work right now? Yes. I take on one or two client projects at a time so each one gets proper attention, and I have space for new work. The quickest way to find out whether I am the right fit is a short email to dave@daveellis.dev describing what you need. ### How do I start a project? The best first step is a short email about what you need at dave@daveellis.dev. I will come back to you with honest thoughts on scope, timing and cost. ### What do you build, web, mobile, or both? Both. I am a web and mobile developer: fast, modern websites and web apps, plus native mobile apps for iOS and Android. Plenty of projects are both at once, a site and an app that share the same content and the same brand. ### What kind of businesses do you work with? Small and medium businesses, from one person up to around fifty, where the website or the system is something you depend on rather than a brochure you forget about. That tends to mean trades and services where the diary and the job sheets are the business, places that live on bookings, manufacturers who need to look as serious as they actually are, and charities and community organisations. Two real examples: Charnwood Coatings & Fabrication, a structural steel fabricator, and The Circle, an award-winning community interest company in Dundee. ### Do you work with businesses across Scotland, or only in Edinburgh? Across Scotland. I am based in Edinburgh, so Edinburgh, the Lothians, Fife, Glasgow and the rest of the central belt are close enough for a kick-off meeting or a discovery session in your own premises. Dundee, Perth, Stirling, Aberdeen, the Borders and the Highlands work the same way remotely, and plenty of projects never need a meeting in a room at all. I also work outside Scotland: Charnwood Coatings & Fabrication in Loughborough is one recent example. The SEO and GEO work is built for global reach as standard, with local search signals added wherever they will win you work. ### What makes you an award-winning developer? The Racing Line, the motorsport app I own, design and develop, won Brand of the Year at the 2026 Race Media Awards. It is used by more than 100,000 motorsport fans and holds a 4.9 star rating from over 2,400 ratings. ### Do I own what you build? Yes, all of it: the code, the domain, the content and your data. There is no licence to keep paying for, nothing that stops working if you stop paying me, and no platform you can only leave by starting again. If you ever want to move to another developer you take the repository and the hosting details and go, and I will help with the handover rather than make it awkward. For a mobile app we agree at the start whose developer account it is published under, because that is what decides who owns the listing, the reviews and the download history. ### What happens after launch? Care and hosting is £45 a month: updates, backups, fixes and the small changes that come up once real customers are using the thing. There is no contract and you can stop whenever you like, because a support plan that is hard to leave is a support plan nobody checks the value of. If you would rather not have a plan at all, that is fine too, and the site is still yours either way. ## Prices ### What does a website cost? A five page website starts at £1,200, including the design, the build, the copy shaping, the structured data and the Google Business Profile setup. More pages, online payments, bookings or a migration from an old platform push it up. Care and hosting afterwards is £45 a month with no contract. ### What does a mobile app cost? From £4,000 for a native iOS app, with Android alongside it priced on top, and 8 to 12 weeks from start to the store. That includes the build, the App Store submission and review, the store listing and screenshots, the privacy manifest and policy, and the first year of OS updates. What pushes it up is anything with a server behind it: accounts and logins, payments or subscriptions, syncing between devices, or data that has to stay correct when the phone has no signal. ### What does a business system cost? From £5,000, and that is where the work starts rather than where it lands. A booking system for a salon and a job-sheet system for a roofer look nothing alike, so every one begins with a £500 half-day discovery: I map what you do now, write down what the system has to handle, and come back with a fixed quote rather than a range. The £500 comes off the build, and if you decide not to go ahead the written scope is yours to take anywhere. ### Why do you publish your prices? Because the first thing anybody wants to know is what it costs, and making people send an email to find out wastes their afternoon and mine. A published number also means we are talking about the same project from the first reply: if £1,200 is not the right order of magnitude for what you have in mind, you know that before you have spent a week on it. The number is a starting point rather than a quote, and the quote that follows is a number, not a range. ### Can I pay in instalments? Yes. A payment plan spread across the build is normal, usually tied to the stages rather than the calendar, so you are paying for work that has actually happened. If you would rather have me available than quoted job by job, a monthly retainer works too. Say which suits your cash flow in the first email and it gets built into the quote instead of negotiated afterwards. ### Is the SEO and GEO work an extra? No, and it never is. Technical SEO, fast Core Web Vitals, clean structured data, a sitemap, an llms.txt and content shaped around what people actually search are part of every build at the published price. A site nobody can find is not a finished site, so charging separately for the part that makes it findable would be charging twice for the same job. ## Web and mobile ### How long does a website take? Two to three weeks for a five page site, from the point the content exists. The build is rarely what sets the pace: it is usually the copy, the photographs and the one person who has to approve things. If you have that material ready, or you are happy for me to shape the copy from a conversation, three weeks is realistic. If a page needs twelve services written from scratch, it takes longer, and I will say so before we start rather than halfway through. ### Can you move my site off Wix, Squarespace or WordPress? Yes, and it is a common reason people get in touch. Rescuing content from a platform nobody has the login for takes longer than starting clean, so a migration pushes the price up rather than down. The important part is what happens to your search rankings: existing URLs are either kept exactly as they are or redirected properly to their new homes, so the pages Google already knows about do not quietly turn into dead ends on launch day. ### Do you work with WordPress, or only hand-built sites? Both, and which one you need depends on who is going to edit the site. Hand-built is faster, cheaper to run and has nothing to keep patching, which suits most five to fifteen page business sites. WordPress makes sense when a team needs to publish without asking anyone, or when the site is already there and the real job is design and structure rather than starting again. The Circle is the second kind: rebuilt and rethemed on WordPress because the organisation publishes constantly. ### Do you build Android as well as iOS? Yes. iOS comes first and is built natively in Swift, because that is where I ship my own apps, and Android is built alongside it. Whether you need both is worth a real conversation rather than a default yes: two platforms is close to twice the testing and twice the store admin, and for some businesses the honest answer is to launch on one, find out whether anybody uses it, and add the second once you know. ### Who handles App Store submission and review? I do, and it is included. That means the store listing and the screenshots, the privacy manifest and the privacy policy, the age rating and the data disclosures, the build upload and the back and forth with review if something gets rejected. Rejections are normal rather than a disaster, and they are much less stressful when the person answering them has been through it with their own apps. The Racing Line, Sauna & Plunge and Peek Notes are all on the store, so this is a process I run regularly rather than read about. ## Business systems and AI ### Can you help a business that has never used AI? Yes, and that is most of them. I do not sell an AI package on its own, because anything bolted on to a process nobody has mapped is a gadget. Every business system includes a full AI integration instead, wired into the workflow mapped during the discovery, along with a written AI policy for your staff and a plain explanation of what the tools will and will not do. Nothing gets trained on your customer data. ### What is the £500 discovery, exactly? Half a day, on site or on a call, mapping what you do now rather than what the system should do. We go through it step by step: who takes the booking, what gets written down, where it goes next, what happens when somebody cancels, and the parts that only live in one person's head. You come out of it with a written scope and a fixed quote instead of a range. The £500 comes off the build if you go ahead, and the scope is yours to take to another developer if you do not. ### Will my data be used to train an AI model? No. Your customer data is not used to train anything, and that is a configuration decision made when the integration is built rather than a promise in a brochure. You get it in writing, along with a plain list of which tools are involved, what each one sees and where it runs. If a question about this turns up on a procurement form later, the answer already exists. ## Security and compliance ### Can you get us Cyber Essentials certified? Yes, and Cyber Essentials Plus too. I have taken organisations through both. You can have me as a consultant, setting the direction, writing the policies and reviewing what your team produces, or as a hands-on implementer who configures the firewalls, the device management, the patching and the access control myself. The certificate is issued through IASME by a certification body and you pay their fee direct, so my part is making sure you pass it first time. Cyber Essentials usually takes 2 to 4 weeks, and Cyber Essentials Plus has to follow within 3 months of it. ### Do you do ISO 27001 implementation? Yes, and I have taken organisations through it before. It is a full information security management system rather than a document pack: scope and context, the risk assessment and treatment plan, the Statement of Applicability, the Annex A controls applied to how your business actually works, and the internal audit and management review an auditor will ask to see. For most small and medium businesses it runs 4 to 9 months to Stage 2. The certification audit itself comes from an accredited certification body rather than from me, so the evidence has to stand up on its own. ### Are you a certification body or an assessor? No, and it is worth being clear about it. Cyber Essentials certificates are issued through IASME by a licensed certification body, and ISO 27001 certificates by an accredited certification body. I am the person who gets you ready for them, and in the hands-on version the person who does the work that gets you ready. You pay the certifying body their fee direct, at their price, with nothing added by me. Anybody who implies they can both prepare you and hand you the certificate is worth a second question. ### We have a tender deadline. Can you work to it? Often, yes, and the date belongs in the first email rather than week three. Cyber Essentials is usually 2 to 4 weeks, so a tender closing next month is realistic. Cyber Essentials Plus has to follow within 3 months of the Cyber Essentials pass, which fixes the order those two happen in. ISO 27001 is 4 to 9 months for most small and medium businesses, so if a contract closes in six weeks and the form asks for ISO 27001, the useful conversation is about what you can honestly say by then, not about compressing a management system into a fortnight. ## Search ### What is GEO, and why does it matter? GEO is Generative Engine Optimisation: getting your business found, understood and quoted by AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews. It is the natural companion to SEO, because a growing share of people now ask an AI rather than scrolling search results. I put heavy emphasis on both, so enquiries come direct to you instead of through paid ads or a marketplace. ### How long before I rank? The technical half is true the day the site goes live: it loads fast, it is structured properly, the markup is there and the crawlers are welcome. What takes time is Google trusting a domain it has not seen before, and that is months rather than weeks. Local search tends to move first, because a properly set up Google Business Profile and real local signals can start winning work quickly. Anybody promising you position one by a date is guessing, and the honest version is that the foundations are in place immediately and the compounding takes a while. ## The longer version of each answer. ### Prices Every number in one place, what moves it, what never costs extra, and what you own at the end. ### Websites What is included at £1,200, the four-step process, and the two client sites it produced. ### Business systems The £500 discovery explained, the AI integration, and four systems for four different trades. ### Security Cyber Essentials, Cyber Essentials Plus and ISO 27001, and how to tell which one you were asked for.