You built a website. It looks great. It’s live. And then your agency sends you a monthly invoice for “maintenance” with zero explanation of what that means. Sound familiar? The maintenance mystery I’ve audited maintenance contracts from agencies across three continents. The most common line item is “ongoing website maintenance, $200/month.” No breakdown. No deliverables. […]
You ask a web agency how much a project will cost. They say “it depends.” Then they quote you an hourly rate. You nod because you don’t know what else to do. This is how most businesses end up spending twice what they planned. The hourly billing trap Here’s the dirty secret of hourly billing: […]
Everyone wants a number. “Just tell me what a website costs.” Fine. But first, let me tell you why the number you’ve been quoted is probably wrong. The pricing landscape is a mess I’ve collected proposals from agencies across Europe, the US, and Latin America this year. The range for a simple business website? $500 […]
“Free” is the most expensive word in web design. I talk to business owners every week who started with Wix, Squarespace, or some other free website builder. They always tell me the same story: it was great at first, then it got expensive (see what real web design costs for comparison), then it got painful, […]
If your website still shows “Not Secure” in the browser bar, you have a problem. And it is bigger than you think. HTTPS is not optional anymore. It has not been optional since 2018, when Google Chrome started marking all HTTP sites as “Not Secure.” Yet I still see small businesses in Spain running on […]
Google has been telling us for years that speed matters. But in 2024, they started putting their money where their mouth is. Core Web Vitals became a ranking factor, and suddenly every business owner needed to care about three little metrics they had never heard of. Let me break them down without the jargon. The […]
I had a conversation last week with a restaurant owner in Marbella. Nice guy, decent business, wanted a new website. His first question: “Can we meet in person? I want someone local.” I get it. It feels safer. Someone you can sit across from, point at a screen, and say “make that button bigger.” But […]
Every month, thousands of business owners in Spain open a PDF from their agency, glance at some graphs they don’t understand, and close it. Impressions went up 15%. Okay. What does that mean? Did anyone actually call? Did revenue change? The PDF doesn’t say. At Fork IT, we stopped sending monthly reports. Here’s why. The […]
Every second agency website in Spain has a Google Business Profile with 3 reviews, no photos, and a description that reads “We are committed to providing the highest quality service to our valued customers.” It’s free. It’s the single most powerful tool for local businesses. And almost nobody uses it properly. Why GBP matters more […]
I installed WordPress on a client’s site last month and counted the plugins their previous agency had left behind. Forty-three. Forty-three plugins for a 5-page brochure site. One of them was a slider they never used. Three were different caching solutions (fighting each other). Two were abandoned plugins that hadn’t been updated since 2022. The […]
I spent three years watching agencies sell “SEO packages” to small businesses in Spain. Monthly reports full of graphs, vanity metrics, and buzzwords. Rankings for keywords nobody searches. Blog posts that read like they were written by a committee. Thousands of euros spent, zero leads generated. Here’s what actually works if you’re a small business […]
Your next customer might never visit Google ChatGPT processes over one billion queries per week. Perplexity has surpassed 150 million monthly active users. Google AI Overviews now appear on roughly 47% of all searches. The way people find businesses is shifting underneath us, and most Costa del Sol companies have not noticed. When someone types […]
Nobody wakes up and thinks “I bet my website is losing me money.” But it probably is. I’ve audited hundreds of sites for small businesses in Spain, and the same five problems show up every time. It’s slow. Like, really slow. Open your site on your phone right now. Count to three. If it’s still […]
I get this question at least twice a week. Someone DMs me asking “how much should I pay for a website in Spain?” and expects a simple number. There isn’t one. But I can tell you what’s actually going on in the market right now. What agencies are quoting in 2026 I’ve seen proposals from […]