What actually happens, week by week.

The real objection is never the price. It is not knowing what you are agreeing to. So here is the whole thing.

Most people who have run a website project before are carrying one bad memory: it took four months, it needed forty hours of their attention, and it stalled twice waiting on something nobody told them they had to provide.

This page exists so you can see the shape of it before you commit to anything. Four to eight weeks for most builds. About three and a half hours of your time in total. Every number below is what we actually run to.

Before you spend anything

Before you spend anything.

Two free steps, and you can stop after either one with something useful in hand.

01
The call
Twenty minutes
Twenty minutes with the people who would do the work. If you have a site we open it and go through it live, and if you do not we use the time to scope one instead. It does not put you on a follow-up sequence.
02
The written estimate
Two business days
If there is a project worth doing, you get one number in writing with what is in it and what is not. Not a range. If you decide against it, you keep the document, even if you take it to another firm. That is a cost we accept.

Week by week

The project, week by week.

01
Week 0: the scope
What we do
Turn the estimate into a signed scope with the sitemap, the template list, the integrations named, and the launch date on it.
What you do
One 60-minute kickoff call. Bring whoever will have an opinion later, because this is the meeting where opinions are cheap.
What you own by the end
The scope document, and the accounts. The repository, the domain, the hosting, and the analytics get set up in your name in week 0, not at handover.
02
Weeks 1 to 2: content and photography
What we do
Write the first draft of every page. Shoot the photographs. Build the design system and the first two templates.
What you do
One 90-minute session, on site, where we shoot and interview at the same time. That is where the content comes from.
Why this is first
Content and photography are the reason projects stall. Doing them first means the build has nothing to wait for.
03
Weeks 2 to 5: the build
What we do
Build every template, wire the integrations, write the schema, configure analytics and conversion events, and run the accessibility pass as we go rather than at the end.
What you do
Nothing, until we send you a staging link. Two rounds of review at roughly 30 minutes each.
What you will see
A staging URL from the first week of building. Not a slide deck of a design.
04
Week 5 or 6: review and fix
What we do
Take your two rounds of feedback, run the pre-launch checklist, and measure Core Web Vitals on the staging build under the same conditions we will measure on after launch.
What you do
Look at it on your own phone, on your own connection, in the place your customers would look at it.
05
Launch week
What we do
DNS and email cutover on a written sequence with a rollback step at every stage. Redirects live before the switch, not after. Search Console submitted, sitemap pinged, ranking baseline recorded.
What you do
Nothing on launch day. If a launch requires the client to be available, it was planned badly.
06
The 30 days after
What we do
Watch it. Anything broken is ours to fix at no charge, because it was ours to get right. At 30 days you get a written report with the live Core Web Vitals, the ranking comparison, and anything still open.
What you do
Tell us what you notice. You will use the site differently than we do and you will find things we did not.

Your time

What this costs you in hours.

The real currency in a project like this is your attention, so here is the whole bill.

Kickoff call: 60 minutes
Content and photography session, on site: 90 minutes
Review round one: About 30 minutes
Review round two: About 30 minutes
Total: About three and a half hours

We write the first draft of the content. We take the photographs. If you want to write your own copy you can, and that is the one decision that reliably adds three weeks to a project, so decide it in week 0 rather than week 4.

Ownership

What you own, and when.

01
The repository.
Set up in your name in week 0. Every commit lands in an account you control.
02
The domain.
In your registrar, in your name. If it is currently held by a previous developer, getting it back is the first thing we do.
03
The hosting account.
Yours, billed to you, with us added as a collaborator rather than the other way around.
04
Every analytics property.
Google Analytics, Search Console, and anything else, owned by you with us granted access.
05
The content and the photographs.
Yours, with a plain-language license, usable anywhere including on a site we did not build.
06
The design system.
In the repository, documented, so the next developer does not start over.

If you leave, you take all of it and nothing breaks, because there is nothing proprietary in it. That is the point.

After launch

After launch.

01
The care plan
Managed hosting and CDN, dependency and security updates, uptime and Core Web Vitals monitoring, verified backups with a restore we actually test quarterly, and a fixed monthly allotment of edits. A one-page report every month in plain language. Month to month after the first ninety days.
02
Search and visibility work
If we are doing the search work, you get a baseline in the first week and a one-page summary every month after. What we did, what moved, what did not, what is next. A quarterly call to decide what to stop doing.
03
Nothing at all
Also a real option. The documentation is written for someone who is not us, on purpose, so you can take the site and run it yourself.

The commitment

When something goes wrong.

It will, at some point, on some project. What matters is what happens next, so here is the commitment rather than the reassurance.

If we miss the launch date because of us, we say so before you notice, with the new date and the reason.
If the scope was wrong because we scoped it wrong, that is our cost to absorb, not a change order.
If organic traffic drops because of a migration we ran, fixing it is at no charge.
If something breaks in the first 30 days after launch, it is ours.
If we are the wrong firm for what you need next, we will say so and name someone better.

Read how we price work