Business website

Coming from a site you already have

Most businesses I talk to are not starting from nothing. They have a site somebody built years ago. The information on it is still right, the phone number still works, and it just does not hold up any more.

That is the easier job, not the harder one. Your words, your photos and your history come across. What changes is everything underneath: it works on a phone, it loads fast, the search basics are done properly, and you can edit it yourself afterward instead of emailing somebody who has stopped answering.

I will also tell you honestly if I do not think a rebuild is worth your money. Sometimes the answer is two fixes to what you already have, and I would rather say that than take $2,400 for something you did not need.

What the two weeks actually look like

We talk for fifteen minutes about what you do and who you are trying to reach. You send me your photos, your current text, and anything you already know you want said differently.

You see a real working version in the first few days, at a private link, on your phone. Not a picture of a site, the actual site. You tell me what is wrong with it and I change it.

When you are happy, it goes live on your domain, I check every page on a phone and on a desktop one more time, and I show you how to edit it yourself. Half the price is due up front to put you on the calendar and half at delivery, and if you are not happy at delivery then we are not done.

It has to work on a phone

Most of the people who look you up will do it on a phone, standing somewhere, deciding whether to call you. A lot of sites were built before that was true and they show it: text you have to pinch to read, a menu that will not open, a contact form running off the edge of the screen so nobody can fill it in.

The phone layout is built as its own real layout, not the desktop one squeezed down. Before anything goes live I check every page at phone width and at desktop width and confirm nothing runs off the edge, nothing overlaps, and every form can actually be filled in with a thumb.

If your current site is hard to use on a phone, that on its own is usually the whole reason to rebuild it.

The search setup you get, and the part I do not do

Every site I build ships with the search basics done properly, at no extra cost and with no package to buy:

• A real page title and description on every page, written for people first, so your listing in search results reads like a sentence instead of a filename.
• A social preview image, so a link to your site posted in a message or on Facebook shows a picture and your name instead of a bare gray box.
• A sitemap, submitted to search engines, so they can find every page instead of guessing.
• Your business details published in the format search engines read: name, address, phone, hours, service area. This is the part that puts your hours and phone number directly in the search result.
• Pages built as plain fast files. Speed is one of the few things search engines measure directly, and slow sites lose people before they load.

That is where it stops, and I would rather you hear it from me now than be disappointed in three months. I am not an SEO company. I do not do keyword research, I do not write monthly ranking reports, I do not buy links, and I will not promise you a position in search results. Anybody who promises you a position is guessing.

What you get is a site with nothing broken underneath it, which is the part most sites get wrong. If you want ongoing search work beyond that, hire somebody who does only that, and I will make sure whatever they need to change on the site is easy for them to reach.

After it is live

The site is yours the day it launches. Your domain, your accounts, your files. You are not renting it from me, and there is no contract that keeps you here.

Most people still want somebody to keep it running, so there are three monthly plans. Care is $95 a month and covers hosting, backups, security updates, uptime monitoring, and small text and photo edits. Care Plus at $349 and Partner at $749 add change requests, so you can ask for new pages, new sections and new features and I work them one at a time.

If you would rather handle hosting yourself, that is a real option and I will hand you everything you need to do it. I am not going to tell you a plan is required when it is not.

The three plans, in full

Your site is yours, including the story of it

I never show a client's site as an example of my work without asking them first. Not a screenshot, not a before and after, not a mention. If you would rather your project stay between us, say so and it does, and it will not change the price or how I treat the work.

If you are happy with it and you are fine with me showing it, that helps me a lot, and I will still ask before anything goes up.