Every site stands on the same foundation. Then it grows to fit the job.

One door in: the Concept Sprint.

I don’t do free drafts to prove I can do the work — the portfolio is the audition. And I don’t quote a build I haven’t mapped, because a number invented in a first phone call is a guess wearing a suit. Every build starts with the sprint, whatever tier it ends up at. The $1,500 is paid up front, at booking — said here plainly so it never reads as billable-later.

The foundation isn’t a package you choose.

It’s how I build, on every project, at every price. You never pay extra for the basics being done right — and you can’t accidentally buy a version without them.

Most of this is invisible when it’s working, which is exactly why it usually gets skipped or sold back to you in pieces. Accessibility is the clearest example. Built in at design time it’s nearly free — contrast ratios, focus styles, and honest markup, all decided once in the design system. Retrofitted later, it’s a project. So it goes in the floor, and it goes in the agreement.

Then it grows — four tiers.

Each tier includes everything before it. Most people start at one or two. The question that decides where you start is simple: will this ever need logins, bookings, or live data? If the answer is yes or maybe, we build on that footing from day one rather than rebuilding into it later. Every figure below is settled exactly in the sprint’s fixed quote — “from” means from, and I’ve never met a business that fit a menu.

Application-tier work is quoted from the objectives map, never itemized on a page — by the time you need logins and live data, the honest number comes from what the thing has to do, and that’s exactly what the sprint maps.

For businesses starting from nothing — or almost.

Two rules sit under everything here: I never cut the price — I cut the footprint. A smaller business gets a smaller complete thing, never a discounted version of the large thing with the foundation thinned out. And when money is the obstacle, we spread time, not price.

Sometimes the deliverable is judgment.

Not everything is a build. Some engagements are advisory: an audit of a site someone else built, a second opinion before you sign elsewhere, a rescue, training for your team, strategy for how your systems should fit together. Every consulting engagement opens with one written line: what decision is this buying? If we can’t answer that, you don’t need consulting yet — and I’ll say so.

What consulting is not: mapping your own build — that’s the sprint, and it’s priced better for the job. And it’s not the small ongoing edits to a site I run for you — that’s what the care plan already covers.

Keeping it running.

A site that’s never touched again quietly goes stale — hours drift, new work never gets shown, reviews age out. The care plan covers what genuinely recurs, and nothing that doesn’t. Prepay a year and take 10% off any plan.

What doesn’t recur, I’ll tell you doesn’t recur. Your homepage structure, your About page, your service descriptions, your legal pages — those get built once and revisited annually. And a brochure site does not need a blog to be found locally. If I don’t think a content retainer would earn its keep for you, I’ll say so, and that’s usually worth more than the retainer.

The refusals, up front.

Most people have been pitched at least three of these. Knowing what I won’t take your money for is probably more useful than another list of what I will.

Everything I do to make you easier to find is something I’d be comfortable explaining to your customers.

You own what we build together.

This is written into the agreement in plain terms, before you sign it — not discovered later. Here it is in the same plain terms.