Approach
How we review a site, and how a quote is formed.
There is no package to choose from, because the work is not the same twice. This page describes exactly what happens between your first email and a site that is live — including how we arrive at a number.
Stage one
The review.
Free, and useful whether or not you hire us. It exists so that both of us are looking at the same facts before anyone talks about money.
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You send three things
Your current website address — or the words “no site”, which is a perfectly good answer. The city or region the business operates in. And what has to work on launch day: the phone ringing, online booking, correct hours for four locations, a menu a customer can read on a phone, a catalogue a buyer can search. If you have a deadline, tell us that too.
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We look at what exists
We read the site the way a visitor does, then the way a machine does. We check what renders without JavaScript, which facts exist as text and which are trapped in images, PDFs, or third-party widgets, whether your name, address, hours, and service area agree across the site and your public listings, whether the structured data matches the page or contradicts it, how the site behaves on a mid-range phone, and whether the routes to contact you actually work. If there is no site, we look at whatever you do have — a social profile, a marketplace listing, printed materials, a competitor you admire.
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You get a written note back
Specific problems in priority order, described plainly enough to act on without us. What we would do about each one. What we would not bother with. And, where it applies, the things you should fix yourself for free — a wrong phone number on a map listing does not require a studio.
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We tell you if we are the wrong choice
If a template would serve you better, if the project is really a software product, or if the problem is not the website at all, we will say so in that note. It costs us an afternoon and saves you a season.
Stage two
The quote.
We do not publish prices, packages, or a “starts at” figure. Not as a negotiating tactic — because a published number for a seven-page site would be wrong for most seven-page sites, and you would find that out late. A quote follows the review, once we can see the actual difficulty.
What moves the number
Six variables, in roughly the order they matter. The last one moves it most.
- Pages
- How many, and how many are genuinely distinct rather than the same template with a different heading. Fifteen real pages is more work than forty near-identical ones.
- Content readiness
- Whether the text, photographs, menus, specifications, bios, and policies exist and are current. Writing from scratch, rewriting, or recovering content out of PDFs and images is work; receiving a clean document is not.
- Locations
- One address or twelve, and whether each needs its own page, hours, staff, service area, and structured data. Multi-location work is where inconsistency does the most damage, so it gets the most care.
- Languages
- One or several, whether usable translations exist, and whether each language needs its own URLs, navigation, and markup. Machine-translated pages nobody has read are worse than a single honest language.
- Integrations
- Booking, ordering, payments, scheduling, CRM, inventory, calendars, review platforms, mailing lists. Every one is a separate system with its own constraints, and each has to be connected without hiding the underlying facts from the page.
- How much structure is missing
- The largest variable by a wide margin. A site with clean text and wrong markup is straightforward. A site whose hours live in a graphic, whose services live in a slideshow, whose menu is a PDF, and whose remaining content is locked inside a page builder’s database is slow — because before anything can be built, the facts have to be recovered, checked with you, and written down properly for the first time.
What the quote contains
A written scope: the pages, the deliverables, what is included and what is explicitly not, what we need from you and by when, the schedule, and the total. One number for the project, not an hourly meter. If the scope changes later, we quote the change in writing before doing it — there are no surprises on the final invoice.
Stage three
Terms, plainly.
- Accepting the scope
- Nothing begins until you have read and accepted the written scope. If something in it is wrong, that is the moment to say so.
- Deposit
- A deposit becomes due after you accept the scope. It reserves the schedule and covers the first phase of work.
- Balance
- The remainder is due before launch. We do not hold a finished site hostage over a change request, and we do not launch on an unpaid balance.
- Ownership
- You own the domain and the content, and the registrar and hosting accounts are in your name from the beginning. If you leave us, you take a working site with you — there is nothing to release, because it was never ours to withhold.
- Ongoing updates
- Optional and quoted separately, with no public monthly price for the same reason there is no public build price. The site works without them; a retainer is for businesses whose facts change often enough to be worth outsourcing.
- What we need from you
- Confirmation of your facts — hours, addresses, credentials, service areas, policies, certifications — and one person who can approve decisions. We will not invent any of it, and we cannot proceed on a guess.
Stage four
Build, launch, and handover.
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Facts first
Before any design, we write down every fact the site will state and send it to you to confirm: legal name, addresses, hours, service areas, services, staff and credentials, policies, certifications, contact routes. This document becomes the source the pages and the structured data are both built from, which is why they cannot disagree later.
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Structure and content
Page structure, headings, and the actual words — written or edited — before visual design. If the page does not read well as plain text, no layout will save it.
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Design and build
Design applied to real content, never to placeholder text. Built as fast, accessible HTML with structured data generated from the confirmed fact set. You see it on a staging URL and review it on your own phone, not in a slideshow.
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Pre-launch checks
The full standards list runs: content readable without scripts, facts as text, details consistent, markup matching the page, contact routes tested end to end, canonical URLs, sitemap, redirects, accessibility, and performance on a mid-range phone.
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Launch
DNS moved with a rollback plan, old URLs redirected, search console and analytics set up in your accounts if you want them, and the external listings we identified corrected or handed to you as a checklist.
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Handover
Accounts, files, and a short written record of where each fact lives and how to change it. Whoever touches the site next — us, you, or someone else in five years — can update it without breaking the consistency we built in.
Start with the review.
Your current URL or “no site”, your city, and what has to work at launch.