Will leaving the EU affect your website? No

Firstly I want to point out from the outset that I refuse to call it Brexit. This is because I flatly refuse to acknowledge another stupid tabloid-created word that sounds like a breakfast cereal.

Anyway, the majority of the country voted to leave the European Union and now it seems the majority of the country is disgusted with the vote and thinks we should stay. This is typical of us Brits. It’s like the weather: We complain when it’s cold and wet all the time but as soon as the sun comes out we all complain that it’s too hot. There is simply just no way of pleasing a nation of whiny, fussy, weather obsessed queuing addicts.

The mainstream media don’t help either. They are all spreading doom and gloom and telling us the pound is worthless, our costs will rise and we’ll all die of poverty which is simply making people believe that’s what will happen. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. What people need to do is say “right, we’ve got what we wanted so let’s make this work. Let’s get our heads together and make Britain great again.” But of course that doesn’t sell newspapers.

So how is leaving the EU going to affect the majority of us? How is it going to affect my industry? How is it going to affect the many companies who rely on my business. How is it going to affect their businesses? The truth is probably not at all. I personally don’t think Joe Average will notice much difference at all, if any. People who have a vested interest in Europe in terms of their market sector will be affected; those who work abroad, foreigners who work in the UK, those who have clients elsewhere in Europe, multi-national companies, overseas investors and the like. People who run small to medium sized businesses and whose businesses are local probably won’t notice. I’m certainly not worried. It’ll be just like when Labour takes over from a Tory government or vice versa; Despite all the uproar, nobody really notices any difference in their everyday life because it doesn’t matter who runs the country, they will all find their own unique way of screwing us.

Of course this doesn’t mean that people won’t tighten their belts and be a bit more frugal. It’ll be just like when the recession hit a few years ago (again, I refused to call that the “credit crunch” because that also sounded like a breakfast cereal). Everyone started shopping at Aldi and Lidl because they realised there was no point paying £5 for something that they could get for £1. It was the same in the web world. People realised they could get a cheap, nice looking Wordpress site rather than pay silly amounts of money for a proper site. This is great except I personally think Wordpress is crap.

These were all subjects I was discussing with a friend of mine the other night whom I know from a business networking group I go to. He’s someone who might be affected by the EU referendum because his market sector is overseas. He was asking me what I charge for websites and hosting and was stunned when I gave him ballpark figures of a few hundred to a couple of thousand for a design and between twelve and thirty pounds a month for hosting. He was stunned because he is used to dealing with figures of tens of thousands. This is because he deals with big companies who have more money than sense and probably assume that they are getting something far superior because they are paying more for it. This is nonsense. What I do is more or less exactly the same, except I do it a lot quicker and without the layers of bureaucracy, politics, middle-men and general bullshit.

So I’d like to reassure all our clients and all those companies who aren’t our clients yet and are spending far too much on their websites, that leaving the EU is unlikely to affect them anywhere near as much as the press would have us believe, if at all. I’d also like to say that if you are spending silly amounts on a website and/or would like a nice one built quickly and at little cost, give us a call.

Fear not, Webxit will not happen.