A business website that stands up to being checked

What this actually solves

Almost nobody buys a website because they want a website. They buy one because a conversation stopped. A buyer in another country asks for a link before they will continue. A procurement team runs a check on a new supplier. A prospective client finishes a good referral call and then goes looking for something that confirms you are a real, established operation — and finds a LinkedIn profile, or a page that has not been touched since 2016, or nothing at all.

That is the actual job of a five-to-ten page business site. It does not sell anything by itself. It removes doubt. Your work is usually impossible to inspect from a distance: nobody can walk your factory, sit in on your consultancy, or judge the quality of your installations from a phone screen. The website is the only evidence available to someone deciding whether to spend an hour on you. When there is nothing there, the safest assumption for them is that you are smaller or newer than you are, and the enquiry goes somewhere else without you ever finding out it existed.

So the pages are chosen to answer questions in the order they get asked. Who are you. What exactly do you do, in words a buyer uses rather than words your industry uses. Have you done this before, for someone like me. Who would I be dealing with. How do I start. Everything else on a brochure site is decoration around those five questions.

What we do, and in what order

The order is deliberate — most of the risk in this project sits in the first week, before anything is built.

1. A discovery call and a written proposal. Thirty to forty minutes on who buys from you, what they ask before they commit, who your two or three closest competitors are, and what a successful outcome looks like in your terms. The proposal comes back with the page list, a one-line description of what sits on each page, and an explicit list of what is not included. One to two days, including the turnaround.
2. Sitemap and wireframes, approved in writing. The pages, the order of the sections on each one, and where the calls to action sit — as structure, before any visual design is applied. We ask for approval by email, in one line. This takes ten minutes of your time and prevents the argument in week three where the site is built and the conversation turns out to have been about different things. Two days.
3. Content, against a template. You get a document with a slot for each page — a heading, two paragraphs, three bullets, one image — plus a folder to upload photographs to, and a date. A blank page stops people; a template moves them. Photographs come through the folder, never through a messaging app, because messaging apps recompress images and you lose the quality you paid a photographer for. Runs in parallel with design; the agreed content date normally falls at the end of the first week.
4. Build, one page at a time, checked on a phone as it goes. Every page is opened on a real handset before it is called finished, not resized in a desktop browser. Forms are wired up and tested by sending a real submission to your real inbox, and the spam folder is checked, because a contact form that silently fails is worse than no form. Five to nine days.
5. Staging review and one consolidated revision round. You get a private link and a specific request — open these four pages on your phone and send everything you want changed in a single list. We send the list back with each item marked as included, not included, or a separate cost, so the boundary is visible rather than argued about later. Three to four days including your review time.
6. Pre-launch checklist, DNS switch, handover. The checklist runs every time and is not done from memory. Every link clicked for 404s, every image given alt text, unique titles and descriptions on every page, HTTPS forced, one of www or non-www chosen and the other redirected to it, sitemap generated and reachable, the staging robots file with its blanket disallow removed — that last one is a genuinely common way a new site spends a month invisible to search engines. Then the domain is pointed, and you get the logins and a short recorded walkthrough of how to change your own content. Two to three days.

What moves the price

The range is $600–$3,000 over 2–4 weeks, and three things decide where inside that range a project lands.

Who writes the words. If you arrive with finished copy and usable photographs, the project is materially cheaper and faster than one where the copy still has to be developed. Writing is real work, it takes days, and it is quoted as its own line rather than absorbed silently into the build.

Whether the design is custom or adapted. Working from a well-chosen commercial theme and shaping it to your brand is a different amount of labour from designing every screen from scratch. Both are legitimate. The difference is visible in the fee and in the timeline, and we will tell you plainly when the cheaper route will produce a result you are happy with.

What actually happens on the pages. Static information and a contact form sits at the bottom of the range. A filterable portfolio, a multi-step enquiry form, a booking integration, or a listing that you need to update weekly are each real engineering, and they move the number far more than adding pages does.

What usually goes wrong

The quote is built by counting pages. You say eight pages, a number gets quoted, and then it emerges that one of those pages needs a fifteen-product filter and another needs a multi-step application form. The page count was never the unit of work. Price follows what is inside the pages, which is why the proposal describes each one rather than listing them.

The build starts before the content exists. This is the reason brochure sites go late, and it is almost never a coding problem. Work is scheduled from the date content arrives, not the date the contract is signed, and the agreement says what happens if that date passes — we finish the build against placeholder text, launch, and treat inserting the real content later as separate work. Without that clause a three-week project becomes an eight-month one that is permanently ninety percent finished.

The site launches without anyone testing the contact form for real. A brochure site has exactly one job at the end of the funnel, and it is the piece most often assumed to work. Forms fail quietly — a mistyped recipient address, a mail service rejecting messages from a new domain, submissions landing in a spam folder nobody opens. Every launch includes a real submission sent to your real inbox, confirmed by you, before the site is considered live.