01 / Build
Web design for people who need the phone to ring.
A five-page site that loads fast, says which cities you cover, and gives a search result somewhere to land. $250 to build, $40/mo to host and keep current.
- Build cost
- $250One time. Written scope before we start.
- Then
- $40/moHosting, SSL, uptime, content changes.
- Typical page weight
- <100KBNo raster images. Every graphic is inline SVG.
- Build time
- 2–3 weeksFrom the call, once we have your content.
What the five pages actually say
Most small business sites fail in the same way: they describe the business the owner wishes they had rather than answering the four questions a customer arrives with. What do you do, where do you do it, what does it cost, and can I trust you. Five pages is enough to answer all four, provided none of them is padding.
Home
One sentence on what you do and the city you do it from, your phone number at a size you can hit with a thumb, and the three services that make you most of your money. Not a mission statement.
Services
Each service you sell, what it typically costs, and roughly how long it takes. Real numbers where you can give them. “Competitive pricing” tells a customer nothing and gives a search engine nothing to match against a query.
About
Who actually shows up, how long you have been doing it, and which cities you cover. This is where the service area lives in plain text, because a customer in Sunnyvale needs to know before they call whether you come out that far.
Contact
Phone, hours, service area and a labelled form — not a wall of required fields. One embedded map. Click-to-call that we test on an actual phone before launch, because a broken tel: link is a silent revenue leak that nobody reports.
Reviews
Your Google reviews, on your own domain, with your replies underneath them. The fifth page used to be a blog or FAQ in our spec and we changed it on purpose: a blog with two posts from launch week actively hurts you, while three honest reviews with thoughtful replies work from day one.
Built by hand, on purpose
There is no theme, no page builder and no plugin stack. The pages are hand-written HTML and CSS with every icon and illustration drawn as inline SVG, which is why they come in under about 100KB with no image requests at all.
That is not craftsmanship for its own sake. Core Web Vitals — how fast the page paints, how quickly it responds to a tap, whether the layout jumps while it loads — is one of the few ranking inputs Google has actually confirmed. It is also the one your competitors running a page-builder theme are quietly failing.
Where five pages stops being enough
Local service businesses that rank well typically run 8 to 20 pages. Below five you have basic presence and limited ranking potential, and we would rather say that on the pricing page than discover it with you in month four.
The honest shape of it: derive your own number. One home, one services overview, one page per service you sell (usually four to eight), one page per city worth targeting (three to six), plus about, reviews and contact. That lands most trades between twelve and nineteen pages.
What happens after launch
Nothing, if you only buy the build. The site sits there being fast and correct, which is genuinely worth $250— you have somewhere to send people and something that does not embarrass you.
If you want it to start pulling searches, that is the SEO & Search Visibility retainer, and what that retainer buys is pages: 8–12 real ones by month three, 15–25 inside the first year, written one at a time so none of them are thin. If the phone is the goal and you have no Google profile worth finding, start with profile managementinstead — it moves faster.
Straight answers
Questions we get on the build.
What are the five pages?
Home, Services, About, Contact and Reviews. That last one used to be a blog or FAQ page, and we changed it deliberately: an empty blog with two posts from launch month is a liability, while a reviews page is proof from day one — even if it starts with three reviews.
What does the $40/mo actually cover?
Hosting, SSL, uptime, and content changes you ask for — new hours, a new service, a price that moved, a photo swap. It is not a retainer and it does not include SEO work; that is a separate product at $199/mo, and we would rather you knew which one you were buying.
Do I own the site?
Yes. The domain is registered in your name, and if you leave we hand over the files. There is no proprietary page builder holding your content hostage, because there is no page builder at all — the site is hand-built HTML and CSS.
Why does it not use WordPress?
Because most of what makes local sites slow is the stack, not the design. A page-builder theme routinely ships a megabyte of JavaScript and a dozen plugins before it renders a word. Ours ship under about 100KB with no raster images at all — every icon and illustration is inline SVG.
That is a real advantage on Core Web Vitals, and Core Web Vitals is one of the few technical things Google has confirmed it uses. It also means nothing to patch on a Tuesday because a plugin had a vulnerability.
How long does the build take?
Two to three weeks from the call, assuming you get us your service list, hours and photos in the first week. The bottleneck is almost always content from you, not build time from us.
Is five pages enough to rank?
No, and we will not tell you otherwise. Market data on local service businesses puts the working range at 8 to 20 pages; a 3 to 5 page site is basic presence with limited ranking potential.
That is what the five pages are for — presence, credibility, somewhere to send people. Growing to 8–12 pages by month three and 15–25 inside a year is the SEO retainer’s job, one page at a time.
Call and we'll scope it on the phone.
Ten minutes. We'll tell you what your five pages would say, what they'd cost, and whether you need them before you need the Google profile work.
A person answers. Fixed prices: $250 + $40/mo, $199/mo, $175/mo — or all three for $325/mo.
Based in Milpitas. Serving the South Bay & Bay Area. Not sure where you stand? Grade your Google profile free.