How working with us goes, and what it costs.

Every business that has come to us has needed something different, and the thing they needed was rarely the thing they first asked for. A menu with fixed packages would have meant selling some of them more than they needed, or squeezing others into a tier that was never quite right. So we don't have one.

What happens instead is simpler than a menu. You tell us about the business, we spend some real time looking at it before we say anything about price, and then we come back with a proposal written for that business, with a number on it.

If you have asked around for a website before, you have probably run into a few of the same things. Pricing pages built as three tiers, where none of them is quite you and the safe choice is always the middle one. A monthly fee attached to a page that hasn't changed since it launched. Templates sold as custom work. A sale handled by one person while the build goes to someone you never meet, which you find out about around week three.

None of this is a scandal. It is what happens when a company has to sell the same thing many times to stay open. We are small enough that we don't have to.

Websites are most of what we do and the thing we are best at, and that covers more ground than it sounds like. A one-page site for a business that lives mostly on social media, an online store, a landing page for a single offer, a booking flow, or a site with a dozen pages and motion built into it.

Things next to websites come up too: small apps, design work, a funnel that starts with an ad and ends in a booking. If it lives on a screen and needs to be designed and built well, ask us, and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right people for it.

Honestly, anywhere from five hundred dollars to five thousand, and where you land depends on what you're asking for. A single page for a business that already has good photos and knows what it wants to say sits at one end. A site with a dozen pages, motion, and copy written from scratch sits at the other. We'd rather tell you where you fall once we understand the business than quote a number before we do.

We say invest rather than spend on purpose. A site is one of the few things you buy for a business that keeps working after you've paid for it. It's open when you're closed, and it's the first impression most people will have of you before they ever talk to you. So the useful way to think about the number is against what the site is supposed to do for you, not against what a template costs.

What moves the number

Pages

A single page and a twelve-page site are different amounts of design and writing.

Photos

If you have good ones, we use them. If you don't, we source or direct them, and that is time.

Words

If the copy needs writing from scratch, that is part of the work, and it is often the part that takes longest.

Motion

The kind of movement you see on our homepage is built by hand and takes longer than a page that stays still.

Extras

An online store, a booking system, or anything that has to talk to another service.

Speed

If you need it faster than usual, it costs more, because it moves other work aside.

1. 1.
   You get in touch. Tell us what the business does and what you want the site to do. A few sentences is enough, and we'll ask about the rest.
2. 2.
   We look at the business properly before we talk about money. How you show up when someone searches for what you do, what your social media says about you, who you're up against and what their sites look like. This takes us a few days.
3. 3.
   You get a proposal with a number on it. It says what we'd build and why, what it costs, and how long it takes. If we think you need less than you asked for, it says that too.
4. 4.
   If you say yes, we start with the design. You see the layout, type, colour and imagery before anything is built, and nothing gets built until you've approved it.
5. 5.
   We build it, and you watch it come together on a preview link. Feedback happens there, on the real thing, not on a document.
6. 6.
   It goes live on your domain. We handle the domain, the hosting and the launch, and we check it on a phone and on a laptop before we call it done.

Most projects take a few weeks from the yes to the launch. The proposal gives you the actual number for yours.

Half when we start, and the other half once the site is delivered. Delivered means live on your domain and working, not a folder of files or a preview link. Until then you've paid for half of something you can watch growing, and the second half only comes due when there is nothing left to wait for.

The one exception is if you'd rather host the site yourself and have us hand over the code. In that case we ask for the full amount before the handover, because once the files are yours there is nothing left for us to deliver.

The domain and the hosting are included, and there is no monthly fee to keep the site online. If you want things changed later, we quote that on its own, as the small piece of work it usually is.

A few things we don't do, so you know before you write.

• We don't sell monthly retainers for a site that doesn't change. Most don't, and when one genuinely does, we'll say so and quote it honestly.
• We don't use templates or page builders. Everything is written by hand, which is why it loads fast and why it looks like yours and nobody else's.
• We don't do reporting. We set up analytics on an account you own, so the data is yours and anyone can read it, including you.
• We won't build you a site if we think you don't need one yet. It happens, and we'd rather say so than take the money.