Custom website design for small businesses

What the $1,950 website actually includes

The yearly price covers the whole job, not just the build. For the first twelve months you get:

• Design and build: a custom design for your business, built on WordPress, responsive on every screen size, with contact forms that go straight to your inbox and payments through Stripe or PayPal if you sell online.
• Search setup: page titles and descriptions, a clean heading structure, structured data for your business and services, an XML sitemap, Google Business Profile setup and Google Analytics.
• Hosting and security: hosting, an SSL certificate, daily backups, software and plugin updates, and an uptime target of 99% a month.
• Changes all year: unlimited content updates and design revisions under fair use. New hours, a new service, a price change or a new photo is a message, not a new invoice.
• Brand extras: logo and brand design if you need one, an email template and social media graphics that match the site.

What sits outside the price: your domain name (you buy and own it), pages or features beyond the agreed scope, and large integrations such as a custom booking engine or a CRM build. Those are quoted before work begins, so there are no surprise invoices.

How a project runs, from brief to launch

1. Brief (day 1). You fill in one short form: what you sell, who buys it, where you work and what you want visitors to do.
2. Plan (within a day). We reply with a page plan, the main search terms for each page and a timeline. Nothing is designed until the plan makes sense to you.
3. Design and build (first week). You get a working preview link, not a static mock-up, so you see the real site on your own phone.
4. Review. You send changes in plain language. There is no limit on rounds and no per-change fee.
5. Launch (usually day 7–14). We connect your domain, switch on SSL, submit the sitemap to Google and check every form.
6. After launch. You pay the balance, and the year of hosting, updates and fixes starts.

Most delays come from content. If your text, photos and logo are ready on day one, a straightforward site can be live inside a week.

Is a yearly price better than a one-off build fee?

A one-off build looks cheaper on the invoice, but most quotes leave out hosting, security updates, backups and changes, which then arrive as separate bills or an hourly rate. A yearly price puts everything in one number, so you can compare it with the true first-year cost of a freelancer or agency. We wrote up the trade-offs in website subscription vs a one-time fee.

The yearly model is not right for everyone. If you have an in-house developer, need a large online store with thousands of products, or want a complex web application, a project quote fits better. Tell us what you need and we will say honestly which route suits you.

How to compare us with other web designers

Put every quote on the same five lines: build cost, first-year hosting and security, the cost of changes, who writes the content, and who owns the domain and files. Then ask each designer the questions in our guide 15 questions to ask a web designer before you hire. A good designer answers all of them in writing.