Websites
Five pages that load fast and say the right thing will beat forty pages nobody maintains. Here's what the options actually look like, and how one gets built.
Part one
Nearly every business site is a version of one of these. Knowing which one you need is most of the decision — and it's usually a smaller one than people expect.
Who you are, what you do, proof you're real, and how to reach you. The right answer for most trades, professional services, and small retail. Fastest to build, cheapest to run, and almost nothing can break.
Catalogue, cart, payment, shipping, tax. Considerably more moving parts, and worth it once you're genuinely selling online rather than hoping to. If you have twelve products, a simpler site with a payment link often does better.
Services, availability, and a way to reserve a slot without a phone call. Well suited to trades, clinics, studios, and anyone currently losing evenings to scheduling by text message.
For work that sells itself visually — builders, photographers, landscapers, makers. Fewer words, larger pictures, and real attention paid to image sizes so the pages don't crawl on a phone.
Part two
Whatever shape a site takes, a page runs the same order top to bottom. Get this sequence right and the design mostly follows.
Part three
More than half your visitors arrive on a phone, and for local searches it's higher. A site designed on a wide monitor and shrunk afterwards always shows it.
Part four
No mystery to it. The order matters more than the tools, and the first step is the one people want to skip.
One job. Get phone calls, take bookings, sell a product, or prove you're legitimate before someone calls. A site trying to do four things does none of them.
Content first, design second. Real words, real prices, real photos of real work. Designing around placeholder text produces a site that looks wrong the day it fills up.
You see it on a staging address before anything is public — on your own phone, not just a screenshot. Changes happen here, where they're cheap.
DNS repointed at a time you pick, SSL live, forms tested, and you shown how to change your own text. Then it's yours.
Almost never the build. It's waiting on content — the photos nobody took, the service descriptions nobody wrote, the price list that needed a decision. If you have those ready, a straightforward site takes weeks rather than months.
Which is why the first conversation covers what you already have, honestly. There's no shame in "nothing," and it's better to plan around it than discover it in week three.
Two kinds of job
Built to fit the business rather than dropped into a template that half applies. Fast by default, readable on a phone, and structured so you can update your own words without calling anyone.
Hosting, domain, SSL, and email get set up alongside it, so there's nothing left dangling at the end.
The site works but nobody can log in. It's slow and nobody knows why. The person who built it is unreachable and the theme hasn't been updated since 2019. All common, all fixable.
We start by finding out what you actually have and who controls it — often the hardest part — then decide whether it's worth repairing or rebuilding.
Questions
Yes, for the things that change — text, photos, prices, hours. We'll show you how before handing it over. Structural changes are worth a phone call, but you shouldn't need one to fix a typo.
Not necessarily. WordPress is right for a site with frequent posting or a large catalogue. For a five-page business site it often adds maintenance, plugin updates, and security exposure you don't need. We'll suggest whichever genuinely fits, not whichever is easier to sell.
It depends on scope, and anyone quoting before asking what you need is guessing. A brochure site and an online store are different orders of magnitude. Tell us what you're trying to accomplish and you'll get a real number in writing.
No. It's simpler when everything lives together and there's one place to call, but we've built plenty of sites that live elsewhere. Hosting details are here if you want to compare.
Start here
An old site, no site, or a rough idea. Fifteen minutes usually sorts out which of the four shapes above you actually need.