The short version
If you only read one thing
- You see the real page before you pay anything. Not a mockup. The actual front page, with your name and your hours on it.
- The prices are published. $900 one page, $1,500 full site, $2,500 with online booking. No call required to find out.
- About a week, not three months.
- Your domain and every account are in your name. Fire me tomorrow and you keep all of it.
- It is ordinary HTML. Any developer alive can take it over, including when the person you want rid of is me.
- There is nothing to log into, so there is nothing to break into. No WordPress, no database, no plugins.
- One person, local, who answers his own phone. 732-963-5333.
- First in New Jersey, third at the global final of the Fiserv Future Techies competition.
The rest of this page is the same argument with the evidence attached, and the parts that do not favor me.
You see the page before you pay
I build your front page first, for nothing. Not a mockup in a slide deck, not a description: the real page, on a screen, with your name and your hours on it. If you do not like it you have lost a phone call and I have lost an evening. Almost nobody does this, because it costs the builder real time up front.
The domain is in your name from day one
Registered on your account, with your card, in your name. If you fire me tomorrow you keep the domain, the files and the site. This sounds like a small thing until you try to leave somebody who kept it all on their own account, which is a very common arrangement and a deliberate one.
Your address is yourshop.com, not a free subdomain
A free plan gives you an address with somebody else’s company inside it: yourshop.wixsite.com, yourshop.godaddysites.com, yourshop.vercel.app. It is free because it is advertising, and it reads that way: customers see it as temporary, it looks wrong on a card or a van, and you cannot take it with you, because the address belongs to the platform rather than to you. Moving later means a new address and starting over on whatever Google had learned about the old one. Yours is a real domain, about $15 a year, and your name is on it.
The price is on the website
Three numbers, published, before you call. Anyone who will not tell you a price until they have had you on a call for twenty minutes is working out what you will pay rather than what the job costs.
You can hand it to anyone
Your site is ordinary HTML on ordinary hosting. No proprietary builder, no platform you have to keep subscribing to, no plugin licenses. Any web developer alive can pick it up and change it. That includes when the person you want to replace is me.
The alternatives
What each option actually costs you
Prices are the typical range, not the cheapest thing you could possibly find. Every one of these is the right answer for somebody.
Build it yourself on Wix or Squarespace
Roughly $20 to $30 a month, forever. Genuinely capable software, and free of me entirely. The cost is your weekends: you are the designer, the copywriter and the person who fixes it at eleven at night. Stop paying and the site goes off. Most of the half-finished sites I see started here.
A freelancer on a global marketplace
Roughly $150 to $500. Cheaper than me and sometimes very good. You are working through a messaging box with someone eight time zones away who has never seen your street, revisions are counted, and if it goes wrong your recourse is a dispute form. Nobody is driving over to look at your shop.
A local agency
Roughly $3,000 to $8,000, often with a monthly retainer. Real professionals with real insurance, and if you are a fifteen-person company that is money well spent. For a salon that needs hours, prices and a phone number, you are paying for account managers, a sales process and an office.
Me
$600 to $2,500 once, and the first page free. One person, local, who answers his own phone and can be standing in your shop this week. Half up front, half when it goes live, two months of changes included, and ninety days of free fixes on anything I broke.
Under the hood
The parts you never see
None of this shows on the page. All of it decides whether you get found, and it is the part that is quietly missing from most cheap sites, because nobody checks it.
Every page has its own title and description
The bold blue line and the gray line under it in a Google result. They are written for each page on purpose. Left empty, or left the same on every page, Google picks something for you out of your own text, and it is usually a menu.
It looks right when somebody shares it
Paste your address into a text message or a Facebook post and a picture, a headline and a line of copy should appear. That is a specific tag in the page. Without it you get a gray box and your bare address, which nobody taps.
Your details in a form Google can read
Your name, phone, what you do and where you do it, written into the page in a machine-readable block as well as in words. It is how a search result gets your phone number and a star rating attached instead of being one more blue link.
One official address per page
The same page can often be reached several ways, with and without the www, or with a tracking tag on the end. Each page states which one is the real one, so Google counts them as one page instead of splitting your standing across four copies of it.
A page for when somebody mistypes
Get the address slightly wrong and most small sites hand you a blank browser error. Yours gets a page with your name on it that puts the person back on the road to your phone number.
A sitemap, and a robots file that lets everyone in
A list of every page, handed to Google on day one rather than left to be discovered over a few weeks. And nothing blocking search engines or AI assistants from reading you. A surprising number of new sites ship accidentally shut, and the owner never finds out.
Descriptions on the pictures
Every image carries a line of text saying what it shows. That is what a blind customer’s screen reader reads aloud, what shows if the image fails to load on a weak signal, and the only thing a search engine can read about a photograph.
Almost no code to download
Your site is text and pictures, with a few lines of script and no framework. It opens on one bar of signal in a parking lot, which is exactly where somebody is standing when they decide whether to call you.
Check any of it yourself. On a computer, open any website, right-click and choose View Page Source. Mine is there to read. So is everybody else’s.
Safety
The part nobody brings up until it happens
Two things decide whether a website turns into a problem later: how many moving parts it has, and whose name is on the accounts underneath it. Neither one tends to come up while you are being sold one.
There is nothing to log into
Most small business sites run on WordPress: a login page sitting on the open internet, a database behind it, and a handful of add-ons written by strangers. Nearly every “our website got hacked” story is the same story: an add-on that needed updating, and nobody updated it, for two years. Your site has none of those parts. No login page, no database, no add-ons. There is no door on it.
That is not theory, it is happening on this page
Bots sweep the whole internet looking for those weak spots, and they find this site the same as any other. Automated traffic from a data center in France works down the standard list here: the WordPress login, the app folders, the config files. Every one of them gets nothing back, because none of those things exist on a site built this way. A good deal of it never reaches the site at all, because Cloudflare turns it away on reputation first. The page you are reading right now is the demonstration.
Nobody is holding a list of your customers
When somebody fills in your form it goes to your inbox and that is the end of it. Nothing is kept on the website. A site that stores names, phone numbers and email addresses is a site that can lose them, and in New Jersey it is the business that has to write to every customer and say so. The safest list is the one that was never there.
Ask whoever you hire: whose accounts are these?
Domain on the builder’s account, hosting on the builder’s account, their email as the password-reset address. It is an extremely common setup and it works fine, right up until they go quiet, close down, or have their own email broken into. Then it is your address, your site and your Google listing, and no way to prove any of it is yours. Ask the question before you sign something. Ask me too.
The padlock, and staying up on a bad day
Your site sits behind Cloudflare, which costs nothing. It gives you the padlock in the address bar. Browsers now write “Not secure” next to sites without it, in front of your customers. It soaks up junk traffic aimed at knocking you offline. And it keeps a copy of your pages on machines near whoever is looking, so the site loads fast and stays up even when the computer it came from doesn’t.
That account is yours, and I will teach you to run it
Not mine with you as a guest. It is opened in your name, on your email, with your two-factor, and you are sitting there when it is made. At handover I spend twenty minutes showing you the four things you would ever need: switching two-factor on, finding your DNS records, checking whether the site is up, and adding or removing a person, me included. You get it written down as well. You should never be one unanswered phone call away from losing your own website.
What I will not tell you is that a website cannot be broken into. Anything on the internet can. What I will tell you is that a site with no login, no database and no add-ons has very little to break, and that the accounts underneath it are in your name with your two-factor on them. You can verify both of those in about a minute.
Straight answer
When I am not the right choice
If you need an online shop with inventory and payments, a site in more than one language, or something built to handle thousands of visitors a day, hire an agency. That is real work and it deserves a team.
If you already have a site you like and it works, keep it. I am not going to invent a problem to sell you a solution.
And if you want somebody with twenty years of work behind them, that is completely reasonable, and it is not me. I am early on. That is exactly why the first page is free and why the prices are what they are.