“The problem with admitting you’re a Web designer is that inevitably the person you’re talking to has a twelve-year-old niece who designed and produced a Website over her summer vacation” -Brian Miller, Above the Fold: Understanding the Principles of Successful Web Design
Your nephew is a great designer. His sites look sharp, they might even be responsive on mobile. But putting him at the head of a full business project where you likely have to connect to user data and other things is like asking an electrical apprentice to rewire your building — not because he can't do it, but because when something goes wrong at 11pm on a Tuesday, he has homework due Wednesday and you have a business to run.
What Nobody Mentions Until It's Too Late
When I started out as a web designer, I had no formal training. I had done a little bit of HTML in a class and learned a little bit more on the go as a marketer. It wasn’t really until I started teaching web development and contracting out services as a developer instead of a marketer, that I really began to learn just how complicated it can get.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of things that will simply not come up in a web development class project:
Security
When your site is handling contact forms, booking systems, e-commerce, or even just a basic login, you are handling user data. That comes with legal obligations depending on your state and industry. A data breach on a small business site is not a hypothetical. These things happen all the time, and it happens most to sites that were built without security as a priority .
SSL and TLS are table stakes. Firewalls, malware scanning, and proper data handling are the next layer, and most free builds don't get there. The other thing that no one mentions about SSL’s is that if you forget to renew your SSL (or just forget to purchase one to begin with), your site will be completely inaccessible to most browsers and your business will look very unprofessional.
Backups
Where is your site backed up? Nobody sets these up. I mean nobody. Until the site breaks, gets hacked, or the hosting lapses and everything disappears, and then everyone wishes someone had set them up.
A proper backup protocol means that when something goes wrong — and something will go wrong — you are restoring from yesterday, not starting from scratch.
Domain ownership
This one is quiet and devastating. Who registered your domain? Whose email address is attached to that account? Who holds the login?
If your nephew registered it under his email as a convenience, and you have a falling out, or he just loses track of it, you could lose your domain like in the case of this IT guy who redirected a company’s domain to a porn site, then tried to hold it hostage for $10,000. Your domain is your address on the internet. Treat it like a deed.
I want to say that most companies lock down their domain controls but most do not. I recently rebuilt a website for a small business whose old developer had been holding the domain name for several years. Fortunately, she had also been paying for the domain and was happy to transfer it to him sos he wouldn’t have to manage it anymore. I have received old jobs call asking where their sites were hosted and how to log into their websites. Companies give a lot of power to their web developer.
Hosting reliability
Free and cheap hosting exists on a spectrum. On one end you have platforms that are genuinely fine for a personal portfolio or a class project. On the other end you have a business site that needs uptime guarantees, customer support you can actually reach, and infrastructure that doesn't share a server with ten thousand other sites competing for the same resources. Page load speed is a Google ranking factor. Downtime costs you customers. These are not abstract concerns.
In a perfect world, most small business owners would understand web hosting (if you are interested in learning more about everything it takes to get your site online and some of the ways that you can do it, check this MDN resource page on publishing your website).
ADA compliance
You might not know this, but the Americans with Disabilities Act applies to websites . Small businesses get sued over this more than you think. Proper alt text, keyboard navigation, color contrast ratios, screen reader compatibility — these are not design preferences, they are legal requirements, and they require someone who knows they exist to implement them.
SEO structure
A beautiful website that Google or your target client’s favorite LLM cannot read is a beautiful website that nobody finds.
We are past the era of optimizing only for search engines. AI assistants — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and others — are now a primary way people find business recommendations, and they pull from structured, well-written, technically sound web content. You may have noticed that Google has been serving AI summaries instead of links more frequently.
Site architecture, heading hierarchy, metadata, page speed, mobile performance, schema markup — these are built in from the beginning or they are very expensive to fix later. If your content is thin, your structure is chaotic, or your site takes four seconds to load, you are invisible to both the algorithm and the AI. Your nephew's class project is probably not being graded on any of that.
We can't manage your nephew. But we can review his project. Let's talk. No pressure. Just an honest conversation about what your site needs and what it's worth to get it right.
The Invoice Arrives. It Just Arrives Late.
Here is how this usually goes. The site launches. It looks great. You share it everywhere, you are proud of it, your nephew did a genuinely good job. Six months pass. A year passes.
Then one of a few things happens:
Your site gets flagged by Google as "not secure" because the SSL certificate lapsed and nobody was watching it. Or a contact form plugin hasn't been updated in eight months and someone used a known vulnerability to inject malware into your site. This was one of the very first things I had to deal with as a first-time-marketer: A compromised wordpress plugin allowed bad actors to inject malware into the site and the site was completely broken. Or you try to update your hours and realize you don't have the login. Or a potential customer on a slow connection gives up waiting for your homepage to load and goes to your competitor. Or you get a legal notice about accessibility.
None of these things announce themselves in advance. They just arrive. What usually happens is that a business owner remembers that they have a website and want to change something and now nobody has any ability to do anything.
The cost of fixing a broken site is almost always higher than the cost of building it correctly. Not because professionals are expensive — though yes, we are — but because bad foundations are expensive to dig up.
So What Do You Do? Let Him Cook
I teach web development. I have seen students who have never written a single line of HTML produce beautiful websites that are both attractive and responsive. Where are new web developers made? In web development classes or at home with the internet, good searches, and a lot of curiosity.
Let your nephew build the site. Genuinely. Let him get the portfolio piece, let him get the experience, be grateful and tell him so. But treat his work as a starting point, not a finished product.
Have a professional audit it before it goes live. Get your domain in your name, in your email, in your control. Invest in real hosting. Make sure someone — someone with a business email and a service agreement and actual accountability — is responsible for keeping it secure, updated, and running.
Your nephew is a kid who was trying to help you. That is a good thing. But your website is infrastructure. It is the front door, the phone line, and the cash register of your business operating simultaneously at all hours without you there.
You wouldn't let an apprentice wire that unsupervised.
You shouldn't let anyone build it without a plan for what happens after.
Let Us Help Your Nephew
Can we manage your nephew? Not exactly. But we can take everything he built, make it secure, make it fast, make it yours, and make sure that when something breaks at 11pm on a Tuesday — he can go to sleep and you can call us.