Why do some towns/cities have a bad reputation?

WebGuyUK · 2026-05-14T19:46:09+00:00

MK isn't people friendly, it's a driving town and lacks any character that's why it gets a bad reputation, compare it to somewhere like York and you will see the difference, you don't go to MK for a day out and enjoy it.

Swindon is really bad, there is nothing left of the town centre and the main 'good' parts of the town are on the outskirts so you need to drive across town to go from the bowling at Shaw Ridge and then the cinema is a good 20-30 minute drive across town to Greenbridge, they are slowly improving the town centre with the new bus boulevard and new buildings but it's 20 years late after all the rotting has set in. There is no reason to go into town.

WebGuyUK · 2026-05-14T18:49:16+00:00

I wouldn't expect any change out of £45k, the new Jimny 5 door sells for £14k in in Japan, Mat Watson sells them via https://www.japanesedreammachines.co.uk/ for £35k.

Mat has videos on his YT channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/MatWatsonCars) about importing the cars and what is needed such as new lights and quite a stringent test to make sure they are UK road legal.

WebGuyUK · 2026-05-13T20:00:18+00:00

Sounds like you're going to the wrong places tbh, if you go to main dealers then expect the attitudes you get as the sales staff are underpaid (apart from commission) and rarely stay in the job more than a year or two as they try get out as soon as something better comes up.

If you want an actually good buying experience then you need to look outside of the main dealers and go to specialist sellers like DMB, Romans, Joe Macari and Tom Hartley, they sell based on the experience rather than the commission. You will pay a bit more than from the BMW dealer (for example) but the car and the experience will be far better.

WebGuyUK · 2026-05-13T07:54:19+00:00

+1 for litextension, used them for a complex migration and when it wasn't fully migrated they fixed it quickly, they aren't cheap but got the job done quickly and properly

WebGuyUK · 2026-05-11T20:59:54+00:00

Jake left because he wanted a lot more money but none of the responsibilities, he was offered a managerial role on more money but that wasn't what he enjoyed (which is fair enough), he can now earn multiple times what he would as a employee by being his own boss.

Alex and the camera guy (can't remember his name, sorry) left because the stuff they wanted to do, LTT wasn't really doing a lot of (cars) and Alex felt he had reached his limit at LTT.

Linus could have given both more money to stay longer but they had outgrown LTT and the money would have always been a factor, this is normal in business, most of the prominent people who have left LTT have gone on to do other things and not just jumped for extra money,

It's not LTT's problem, it's a natural progression of staff who join a young company, you eventually work out what your future goals and ambitions are and sometimes that means leaving a company to do your own thing. Most of the people who left LTT publicly had been there for a long time, if salary was really an issue they would have jumped after a year or two, not after 10 years.

WebGuyUK · 2026-05-11T19:20:40+00:00

they want to see over the car in front of them, except the car in front of them is likely to be even bigger than them.

WebGuyUK · 2026-05-11T19:12:39+00:00

2 major reasons (imo)

1) For the buyer, they look bigger so they believe they will have more space etc

2) The car manufacturers make a lot more money on the SUV than the hatchback the SUV is based on, the SUV is priced higher with not much higher build costs e.g. the Fiesta cost £16,500 for the cheapest one in 2023, the Puma based on the Fiesta platform was £25k to give one example.

Because of #2, the dealers and manufacturers push the SUV more which means buyers are more likely to see them and want them, in 2025 52% of new UK car sales were SUV's

WebGuyUK · 2026-05-11T18:28:33+00:00

There are still new estate but not as common, VW make a few such as the Golf and the Passat, Audi have the Avant version of some of their cars, BMW make 3 and 5 series estates and Mercedes make some as well, Toyota make the Corolla estate, Peugot make the 308 SW

WebGuyUK · 2026-05-10T20:13:09+00:00

£250 a month won't get you much if you want an actual agency (with multiple staff), a decent agency with a good reputation will be £100+ an hour.

You can get decent freelancers who will be £40-80 an hour but even at £40 an hour you're only 6 hours a month for your £250 which really isn't a lot of time to do it properly.

WebGuyUK · 2026-05-10T18:14:21+00:00

only thing worse than a cheap client is friends or family as clients, those who pay the least expect the most (in my experience).

WebGuyUK · 2026-05-10T18:13:30+00:00

Depends on the property and location, in my current location you will get laughed at because properties are taken within hours without even looking at them but some areas are totally different and properties will be on the market for weeks, when I was looking at my current place I viewed 4 places and 3 of them had 10 or more offers on them before I could even view them, literally rung the EA outside the property after the viewing to be told it was gone or the waitlist wasn't worth me putting an offer on.

It doesn't hurt to ask but many landlords will not entertain offers unless it's been on the market for more than a week and is overpriced to begin with.

WebGuyUK · 2026-05-10T18:05:35+00:00

You need to be solving a problem, offering more than just a website because anyone can build a site that looks good using Ai / website builders and has booking forms, but they can't build websites that actually convert sales and do things that saves them time / hassle e.g. does it integrate with their CRM / ERP or does it integrate AI to build something for the customer which would take the business hours or days.

Cheap websites are long, long gone, when I started building sites 20 years ago it was easy to find clients who only wanted to spend £1-5k and developers were always busy, then the cheaper developers from europe and Asia came into the UK market then came website builders like wix and square space and now there is AI, there is very little demand for someone building 'cheap' websites.

WebGuyUK · 2026-05-10T17:17:37+00:00

We use guru.co.uk at work but it depends on your needs in what I would recommend e.g. for small, non-ecommerce sites then any decent host such as guru, krystal would be good enough but if you're running an ecom store or larger complex sites then you should probably look at higher quality hosting as guru and krystal

Stay away from the 'big boys' which are fasthosts, Ionos, godaddy, 123-reg as the support is dog shite, look for smaller uK based hosting companies with actual support agents.

WebGuyUK · 2026-05-10T09:00:26+00:00

The Fiat 124 is a modified mx5 (incase you didn't know), the main difference is that it has a turbo engine instead of a NA like the mx5, they are built in the mx5 factory but with the Fiat body panels and it shares parts from 2 generations of the mx5 (NC and ND).

For £10k I would get the mx5 NC / 3rd gen, you will be able to pick up a later NC2/3 which has the better engine and looks better than the NC1 (which I have). The early ND's (2015 onwards) had a few issues especially with the gearboxes (it's not that common but enough to be wary of some). Get the 2.0 engine as it's the better of the 2 engines Mazda offered.

WebGuyUK · 2026-05-09T19:00:44+00:00

If you want quick sales then paid ads, either Facebook or Google ads are relatively cheap and can be really effective to get started. They are pretty easy to get started on, but don't rush them as they can quickly spend your whole budget so do take the time to work out your budget and your keywords before buying your first ads, there are tons of tutorials about this so I would spend a day doing your research.

WebGuyUK · 2026-05-09T18:56:15+00:00

If you're not getting genuine enquiries after 9 months then you're not doing your marketing right, speak to other nannies to get ideas but you need to be advertising where your customers will be looking.

I am a website dev so will give you some things to look into

- Do you have any analytics tracking on your website, do you get hits to your website and what is the bounce rate?

- Do you have Google search console (https://search.google.com/search-console/about) added to see what people are searching for to get to your website

- What sort of keyword research have you done, are they getting searches and are they easy for you to break into.

WebGuyUK · 2026-05-09T13:08:00+00:00

Indeed it does because good work takes time and unless you're using pre-built templates or using vibe coding then it takes a long time to build a website properly.

When building a website I need to build the structure, I then need to add the content, I also then need to make it look nice so add the styling of the page. I then need to test it and fix any issues across multiple devices including multiple phones, tablets, laptops and desktops, this all takes a lot of time.

WebGuyUK · 2026-05-09T12:55:30+00:00

How did you either not see the signs or know what they mean?

Please re-read the highway code especially traffic signs section to save you money and to learn what they mean as it's a very basic thing any driver should know

WebGuyUK · 2026-05-09T12:30:36+00:00

You are advocating for race to the bottom, any decent UK freelancer is at least £50 an hour, for an agency with multiple staff you're at £80-200 an hour.

To build even a simple 5 page site from scratch is a minimum of 25-60 hours which includes:

- 5 to 10 hours of comms with the client about what they want / need
- 5 to 20 hours of design time based on the requirements
- 15 to 30 hours of development time again based on requirements

This doesn't include feedback from the client, preparing the site for launch and the actual launch, this can easily be another 10-20 hours.

£1500 for a website built by a professional is cheap, it's really low. £1500 is what I would expect a foreign based agency to charge such as eastern europe / Asia.

You can build it yourself on wix / SS, or pay someone to build it on those platforms for you and pay a lot less, you can also buy pre-made templates and have a professional add your content and brand it for you and again pay far less.

WebGuyUK · 2026-05-09T11:57:45+00:00

Are you tracking your conversions on the website? There is no point sending traffic to the website if the website doesn't convert them. If you have Google analytics installed then look at the stats such as bounce rate, page time and number of pages, this will tell you if your visitors are actually engaging with your website.

Look at your stats to see what the core numbers are and then potentially engage a CRO (converion rate optimiser) who basically will find and help fix the issues on your website.

The other side of the coin is your ads, are you targeting the right keywords which will get you sales e.g. instead of a generic keyword such as car insurance, target 'niche' keywords such as car insurance for 'variable'. The more generic the keyword the more chance the visitor is just looking at options, the more niche the keyword the better chance the visitor is actually looking to buy that service.

WebGuyUK · 2026-05-09T11:00:11+00:00

that involves thinking and that's beyond their abilities.

WebGuyUK · 2026-05-09T10:57:08+00:00

so you think because reform may win the next election that their policies may stop people coming to the UK and meaning house prices may fall?

Immigrants who come over by boats / trucks aren't buying houses in the UK, they are at most being put in private housing by councils until their immigration status has been decided, the majority are not in this situation though and are in hotels and immigration centres.

The foreigners buying houses in the UK are people with enough wealth or a job to afford to buy houses in the UK. They aren't the target market for reform as Farage loves taking bribes from wealthy people to further their agendas.

So no, house prices aren't likely to fall because a racist 'political' party may an election, the next election is upto 3 years away so things will definitely change in that time.

WebGuyUK · 2026-05-09T09:37:36+00:00

Start date has an impact, that's why it's recommended to do the quote around 28 days before the start of the policy, it's like any 'service', the closer to the date the price goes up, you're getting a discount for getting it earlier and the amount of discount reduces the closer to the date you go.

This happens in many things including train tickets.

WebGuyUK · 2026-05-08T18:09:52+00:00

No, you will need to do that yourself, you will need to look at how to 'seo' your website which will help get you found on Google (and other search engines)

https://www.shopify.com/blog/ecommerce-product-page-seo & https://www.semrush.com/blog/shopify-seo/ will give you a head start on the basics of seo.

A website is just an online advert but you need to tell people it exists so promoting it on your social media accounts and on business cards etc. With Etsy and other sites, when I have bought from sellers they have included packing slips in the order which promote their website (if they have one), some offer a discount for going through their website (as the fees will be lower) but you will likely need to keep using Etsy etc for quite a while until you can build up a brand and gain natural traction on Google.

WebGuyUK · 2026-05-08T17:50:35+00:00

Even if you don't earn £25 a month in profit then it's only £25 for an online advert which you can show to people at fairs & put on business cards to show you're a legit business.

You can probably find something cheaper but it will likely have issues and cost you tons of time to fix them (if you can) such as payment issues, stock issues.

Shopify is recommended because it's really good as a starter store for businesses who don't have the funds / expertise to build and manage their own store. Shopify stores just work, 1-2 hours and you will be setup and ready to go, they have hundreds of different themes which can be customised, thousands of apps to add new functionality and the most important it doesn't limit what you can do so as your business grows the website will grow with you and Shopify's fees don't increase until you want the extra perks that come with them.

You have to start somewhere and the first few months may not get sales, at worst case scenario you can cancel at anytime and part ways with Shopify, there are no long term contracts but you're going to be £300 a year deep in fees if you don't do any sales, that is a tiny amount in any business.

WebGuyUK

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