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

Nobody stumbles onto your website anymore. Every visitor was sent — by a friend, a past customer, a truck they saw on the highway, or an assistant they asked. So the site has two jobs: be the complete, accurate record of what you do, and make sure that arrival turns into a conversation instead of a dead end.

§ 01 · Where it starts

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.

Then the build runs in four phases, and the money follows the phases. You pay as things are approved, never all at once, and each phase includes two rounds of revisions — enough to get it right, bounded enough that the project actually finishes.

Identity

The visual foundation — marks, palette, type — settled first, so everything after it inherits from one source instead of drifting.

Concept

The sprint’s concept grows into the real page designs, reviewed live on a private preview — you approve what you can see and click, not a description of it.

Build

The approved designs become the working site — forms delivering, pages fast, every Standard obligation met and verified.

Polish & launch

The pass most projects skip: refinement against the built thing, then the domain cutover, the listings, and a dated sign-off.

The sprint fee credits against kickoff. How the build is paid is written into the agreement — you pay as phases are approved, never all at once.

Two rounds of revisions per phase, included. Work past that is possible and always flagged before it starts — $175/hour, or $125/hour on a care plan. Nothing is metered silently.

§ 02 · The Standard

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.

Fast on any phone

Loads in a blink, even on a weak signal in a parking lot.

Works for everyone

Readable, tappable, and usable for customers with disabilities — built to WCAG 2.2 AA.

Secure and backed up

Encrypted, monitored, restorable — and the backups actually get restore-tested.

Legally covered

Email that arrives

Authenticated sending, so your messages don’t land in spam.

Forms that reach you

Spam filtered out, every lead delivered two ways. None lost.

Found and accurate

Your hours, services, and area correct on Google, Apple — and in AI answers.

No junk

No trackers, no cookie pop-ups, no bloat slowing it down.

Included with every site.Never a line item, never an upsell.

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.

§ 03 · The ladder

Then it grows — the first rung, then four tiers.

Each tier includes everything before it. Every build begins with a paid Concept Sprint — the only door in. 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.

First rung

Signpost

One page. The floor, whole.

$3,500 flat

One page carrying the entire Standard. Not a thinned-down site — a smaller complete one.

Tier 1

Presence

Look real. Be reachable.

from $6,500

Your story, told once, well
Your work, shown properly
Contact that actually works
Google Business Profile claimed and set up right

Tier 2

Local growth

Own your area.

from $12,000

Everything in 1, plus

A dedicated page for every service you offer
Portfolio and case studies organized to sell, not by date
A working review system — asked for properly, never gated
Listed everywhere that matters: Google, Apple, Bing, Yelp

Tier 3

Application

Let customers do things.

from $20,000

Everything in 2, plus

Online booking and scheduling
Customer logins and portals
Instant quotes and smart forms
Live data — listings, inventory, pricing

Tier 4

Always-on service

It answers at 9 p.m.

priced per engagement

Everything in 3, plus

An assistant that actually knows your business
Instant follow-up on every lead
Booking and questions handled after hours

Its own monthly service — yours to keep even if the site moves.

Built once. Then held — or handed over.Care holds the Standard true — monitoring, backups, updates, edits, and a monthly report. Release hands you the repo, the domain, and your exports — and some projects are built to end there.

Two gates, said out loud: the scope stays one page — the sprint’s objectives map is what decides that; if it doesn’t fit, the quote comes back Presence — and it’s for a business that already has a workable identity on arrival (no logo/name work bundled in; that’s Founding Identity). The $1,500 sprint, paid up front, credits in; $2,000 balance.

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.

§ 04 · Packages

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.

New Business Launch

The sign, the site, and the handshake.

$10,000

Everything a new business needs to exist properly online, as one engagement: the Founding Identity below, a Presence-tier site, Google Workspace on your own domain with email that authenticates, and your Google Business Profile claimed and set up right.

The Launch Schedule: $2,500 down and $500 a month for twelve months — the same $10,000, no financing premium, with a care plan required during the term. A defined build with a defined end. You own the result the same way every client does; this is not a website subscription.

Founding Identity

A real mark, before anything else.

$3,500

A logo suite, palette and type tokens, and a brand one-sheet — the visual foundation a business needs before a site can be built on it. This price has a gate, and I’ll say it out loud: it’s for businesses with nothing formalized yet. It’s a different scope, not a discount.

Identity, for an established business

The same work, against more history.

from $6,500 with a build · from $8,500 standalone

When there’s an existing business with real equity in its name, identity work carries more interrogation — what’s true, what’s earned, what has to survive the redesign. Bundled with a Presence site as a Brand Launch, $12,000 — a thousand under the parts.

Want to see more than one direction? Three directions on paper, one built: +$3,500 on Presence, +$4,500 on Local growth.

§ 05 · Consulting

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.

$175

per hour · 2-hour minimum

$700

half-day

$1,400

full day

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.

§ 06 · Care

Keeping it running.

Every site I host is on a care plan. Not an upsell — a condition. The site lives on my infrastructure, and the parts of the Standard that are continuous — patching, backups and restore tests, monitoring, listing accuracy — are only true while someone is holding them. I won’t host a site I’m not maintaining.

If you’d rather run it yourself, that’s a real option and not a lesser one — see Ownership and exit below.

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.

Before Base — Signpost only

Signpost Care

$100/mo

Available while your site is a Signpost — one page, no sub-pages. If it grows, care moves to Base, and I’ll tell you before it does.

Hosting, SSL, and security patching
Security headers, DNS, and DNSSEC
Domain lock and expiry monitoring
Backups, with restores actually tested
Uptime monitoring
Authenticated email kept working
Your Google Business Profile kept accurate
A quarterly report showing what was watched and what was done
Two content edits a quarter, turned around in seven business days
An annual review — a call and a short list of what I’d do next

This is the same floor every site I build gets. What the larger plans add is reach and cadence — not protection.

Base$175/mo

Hosting, SSL, backups, uptime monitoring, security updates, form-delivery testing, minor content edits.

Growth$350/mo

Base, plus monthly profile posts and photos, review responses, a quarterly content refresh, and a monthly summary you can actually read.

Managedpriced per engagement

Growth, plus ongoing pages and content, citation auditing, performance monitoring with alerts, and conversion instrumentation.

How you pay is worked out with you. Monthly on autodraft, a year at a time at 10% off, a rhythm that matches how your business takes money in — whatever fits. The price doesn’t change; the timing can.

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.

§ 07 · What I don’t sell

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.

Accessibility overlay widgets

The one-line-of-JavaScript “instant compliance” button. The FTC fined the largest vendor $1 million for claiming it made sites compliant, and sites running overlays have been sued anyway — the widgets can actively interfere with the assistive software people already use. I fix the source instead.

Ranking promises

Nobody can promise a position they don’t control. Anyone who does is selling you either a coincidence or a manipulation, and both eventually cost you.

“AI visibility” products

AI answer files, special markup sold as a citation driver, single-number visibility scores. Ask the same assistant the same question twice and you get meaningfully different answers — a score built on one sample is a picture of noise. What actually works is unglamorous: complete listings, real reviews, and your services, hours, and prices as plain visible text.

AI-written content at volume

I build with AI every day and I won’t fill your site with machine-written pages. The documented outcomes are bad, and the pages are indistinguishable from everyone else’s.

Compliance programs you don’t need

Most of the privacy regimes people get sold have thresholds far above a local business. I’d rather give you the privacy policy you genuinely need and keep the tracking junk off your site — which is free, and is the risk that’s actually real.

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

§ 08 · Ownership and exit

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.

Yours from the start

Your content, your photographs, your logo, your data — yours throughout, and nothing in the agreement moves any part of that to me. Your payment processing, your Google Business Profile, your business email, your social accounts: set up in your name, owned by you, with me added as a manager. I don’t want to be the middleman on your revenue or the owner of your business identity.

Yours as it’s paid for

The design, the page structure, and the source code written for your project transfer to you as each phase is paid. The method is mine. What it builds is yours. The house tooling underneath stays mine — you get to use and change it as part of your own site, permanently, but you can’t resell it as a starting kit, and neither can anyone else.

Running it is a service, not a hostage situation

I host and operate the infrastructure under my own accounts, which is what makes the Standard cheap to guarantee — one hardened setup, maintained once, applied to every site. That arrangement runs as long as your care plan does. Either of us can end it with thirty days’ notice, and there is no termination fee, no exit fee, and no penalty.

Two ways a project ends, and both are normal.

Held. I keep it — hosting, patching, backups, monitoring, edits, and a report that shows the work.

Handed over. You get the repo, the domain, your exports, and your data, and you run it from there. Some projects are built to end this way from the first conversation, and there’s no penalty for choosing it — it’s written into the agreement, not negotiated on the way out.

What I don’t do for free is the move itself. Handing you your things is included. Standing the site up on someone else’s infrastructure, moving DNS, or briefing a successor is quoted work.

And if you go

You get a named list of things, not a vague promise of cooperation: your repository with its full history, your data, your design source files, your analytics, your domain, and the configuration needed to run it — inside ten business days of asking. Your site stays up for thirty days while you move. I won’t keep your bags packed and then bring the moving truck — actually relocating a site to someone else’s setup is real work and it’s billed as such — but nothing is withheld, delayed, or switched off to make leaving harder.

§ Where to start

The first conversation is a conversation.

Not a pitch deck and not a proposal you have to decode. We talk about what the site is actually for, what decision you’re trying to make, and whether I’m the right person for it — which sometimes I’m not, and I’ll tell you that too.

Start a conversation → How the work runs →