You describe it once. The system builds it.
Five steps, the same five whether it is four pages or a booking system. What changes is how long step three takes. Below each one is what it needs from you, what runs while you are not looking, and the mistake that step exists to catch.
The total of your time, from the first call to the day it goes live, is usually under two hours.
What each step costs you,
and what it catches.
Call
Twenty minutes. What the business does, who you want walking through the door, and what the site has to make happen.
Twenty minutes on a call, and afterwards a look at the summary we send to check we heard it right. Bring the price list if you have one and the name of a competitor whose site you do not hate.
- The call is written up into a brief you can read in a minute
- The brief names the pages, the languages and what the site has to make happen
- Anything ambiguous is listed as a question rather than guessed at
- You get the brief and the fixed price in the same message
This is where a misunderstanding is free. A wrong assumption caught in the brief costs a sentence; the same one caught at launch costs a week.
Draft
A first real version goes up on a private link, usually within two days. You look at a working page, not a picture of one.
Open a link and say what is wrong with it. Not a review meeting, not a document — the useful version of this is four sentences in a mail.
- The layout is drawn from the brief and the pages are filled with real words, not lorem
- The checks run before you ever see it: contrast, overflow, tap targets, keyboard, links
- It goes up on a private link that nobody can find and search engines are told to ignore
- The first version is deliberately plain, because arguing about a colour before the structure is right wastes both passes
This is where you find out the site is about the wrong thing. It happens, it is nobody's fault, and on day two it costs a rebuild that takes an afternoon.
Build
Pages, words, forms, payments. Every change lands on the same link within the hour, so there is never a version you have not seen.
Answer questions as they come, usually one or two a day, usually a yes or no. Send whatever pictures and documents you have — a phone photo of the shop beats a stock image of a different shop.
- Pages, words, forms, payments, and the twenty small rules that turn out to be the real work
- Every change lands on the same link, usually within the hour
- Every push runs the full check suite; a build that fails one does not reach the link
- What changed is written down in one line per change, so you can read the week in a minute
This is where scope grows if nobody is watching. Anything that is genuinely new gets quoted as its own fixed price before it is started — never added to an invoice at the end.
Launch
Domain, mail, analytics, the legal pages. It goes live on the day you say it goes live, and not before.
Say the date. Then hand over the domain login, or let us walk you through pointing it — it takes about ten minutes and you keep the account either way.
- Domain, mail, analytics, the legal pages, the redirects from the old site if there is one
- The final check run, plus the ones that only make sense on the real domain
- It goes live on the day you said, and not before — no soft launch you did not ask for
- The old site stays reachable for a week in case something was on it that nobody mentioned
This is where a forgotten page from the old site would quietly stop existing. The redirect list is built from what was actually being visited, not from what anyone remembers.
After
It stays patched and quick. When you want a new page or a new field, you ask for it in a sentence and it appears on the link.
Ask for things in a sentence when you want them. "Add a page for the new treatment", "the opening hours changed" — that is a sufficient brief.
- Security updates and dependency patches, applied and checked, not announced
- Backups you can actually restore from, tested rather than assumed
- Uptime watched, and you hear about an outage from us rather than from a customer
- Small changes made and on the link the same day, inside the care plan
This is where most small-business sites rot: nobody owns them, so nothing is patched for three years. The monthly is what stops that, and it is cancellable precisely so it does not have to be argued for.
Five things that do go wrong,
and what happens then.
Nothing here is hypothetical politeness. These are the five ways a small build actually fails, and a shop that has not written down its answer to them has not thought about them.
The draft is not what you meant.
Say so on the link. A first draft is redone rather than argued with — it is two days of work, not two weeks, which is the entire reason the first version goes up so early.
The scope turns out to be bigger than the call suggested.
You get told before any of it is built, with a fixed price for the extra part and the option to leave it out. The original figure does not move because we underestimated it.
Something breaks after launch.
Every change is a commit, so the site goes back to the last good one in minutes rather than being debugged live. Then it gets fixed properly, and a check is added so that exact thing cannot ship again.
You want to leave.
There is nothing to hand over. The repository, the domain and the accounts are already yours, the care plan cancels monthly, and nothing stops working when it does.
We turn out to be the wrong shop for it.
You get told on the call, before you have paid anything. Some of what people ask for should be a person, a product off the shelf, or nothing at all.