Skip to main content
Serving the Wabash Valley — Illinois & Indiana— Now Accepting Early Clients
Service

Web Design & Development

Custom websites for small businesses and solo operators — not drag-and-drop templates, not Wix bloat, not WordPress with 30 plugins bolted on. Real, hand-built sites that load fast, work on every device, score green on accessibility audits, and rank because the foundation isn't fighting Google. Examples on this very site, and a live one we'll talk through below.

Pricing
$800 – $5,000+
Timeline
2 – 8 weeks
Best For
Small businesses needing a real site
What You're Paying For

Pricing

Landing Page
$800–$1,500
Single high-conversion page
  • 1 page, multi-section
  • Mobile-first responsive
  • Lead capture form
  • Schema markup
  • Cloudflare hosting setup
  • 2 rounds of revisions
Custom Build
$3,500–$5,000+
Larger sites or custom functionality
  • 10+ pages or custom features
  • API / integration work
  • Custom forms / workflows
  • CMS or admin panel
  • Cloudflare Pages Functions
  • Scoped per project

Hosting on Cloudflare Pages is included in setup — the actual hosting is free up to generous limits. If your site outgrows that, you'll know, and we'll move you to whatever's appropriate.

What's In Scope

What You Get

  • Hand-coded HTML, CSS, and (when needed) JavaScript — not WordPress, not Wix, not Squarespace. Static sites for static content, with dynamic functionality only where it earns its keep.
  • Mobile-first responsive design — every page tested at 360px, 720px, 1024px, and 1440px. No "looks broken on my phone" surprises.
  • Accessibility (WCAG AA) — semantic HTML, proper heading hierarchy, color contrast, keyboard navigation, ARIA where needed, skip links, focus states. Real accessibility, not a widget bolted on.
  • Performance built in — image optimization, font subsetting, no render-blocking dependencies, CSS that ships in kilobytes, not megabytes. Lighthouse scores in the 90s.
  • SEO foundation — clean semantic markup, schema.org structured data, proper meta tags and Open Graph, fast Core Web Vitals, sitemap and robots.txt, Search Console verification.
  • Cloudflare hosting setup — SSL, CDN, DDoS protection, automatic deploys from GitHub, edge caching. Free at this scale; upgrade path documented.
  • Forms and lead capture — contact forms wired to email, optional connection to your CRM or email service provider
  • Source code in your hands — the repo is yours. If you part ways with me, you don't lose your site — another developer can pick it up cleanly.
  • Documentation — written runbook explaining how the site works, how to update content, how deploys happen, who to call when things break.

Not included

  • E-commerce checkout (see Store Setup for a real platform-backed store)
  • Branding / logo design (referrals available)
  • Photography (referrals to local Wabash Valley photographers available)
  • Long-form copywriting beyond what you supply (referrals available)
  • Hosting beyond what Cloudflare's free tier covers (rare for small-business sites; we'll discuss if needed)
  • Ongoing content updates after launch (see Monthly Management)
How It Works

The Process

  • Week 1 — Discovery and Wireframing. One-hour call. What does the business do? Who are the customers? What does the site need to accomplish? I sketch wireframes, you approve direction before any pixel-pushing happens.
  • Week 2–3 — Design and Build. Visual design and front-end build happen together (no separate "design phase" billed twice). You see progress on a staging URL throughout.
  • Week 3–5 — Content, Forms, Integrations. Content gets loaded, forms get wired up, schema markup goes in, accessibility passes happen, mobile QA happens, performance gets tuned.
  • Week 5–6 — Pre-Launch Review and Launch. You walk the site, I make final tweaks. Domain points at production, search console gets registered, sitemap submitted, analytics tracking goes live.
  • Post-launch — 30 days of support included. Bug fixes, content tweaks, "how do I update X" answered.
Common Questions

FAQ

Why not WordPress / Wix / Squarespace?

For most small business sites, hand-coded is faster, cheaper to host, more secure, and easier to maintain — counterintuitive but true. WordPress has a heavy update treadmill and a security-vulnerability tax that you pay forever. Wix and Squarespace lock you in and bill you monthly forever. A static site on Cloudflare Pages costs $0/month to host and never has a "your plugin needs urgent updating" problem. The trade-off: content edits aren't drag-and-drop. If you need to update marketing pages weekly without a developer, WordPress might still be the right call — tell me upfront and I'll route you accordingly.

How will I update content?

A few options depending on your comfort level. Most likely: I show you how to edit the markdown or HTML files in GitHub's web editor, and changes auto-deploy in 2 minutes. Comfortable with that? Great, you're independent. Not comfortable? You email me changes and I make them — or we set up a small CMS where you can edit specific fields without seeing code. Or you sign up for monthly management and never think about it again.

What about a logo and branding?

If you have one, great — I'll work with what you've got. If you don't, I'll either keep things typography-driven (which can look sharp without a logo) or refer you to a designer for branding work first. I don't pretend to be a brand designer; that's a separate skillset.

How fast will it load?

For a typical small-business site I build, expect Lighthouse scores of 95+ on Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO. Real-world load times under 1 second on broadband, under 2 seconds on 3G. You can compare with whatever your current site or your competitors' sites score on PageSpeed Insights.

Will it work on phones?

Yes, and that's not a feature — it's table stakes. Mobile-first design is the default. Every page gets tested at multiple viewport widths. If something looks wrong on a phone, that's a defect, not "a known issue we can address in a future phase."

What if I want to add a store later?

Adding e-commerce to a content site is a separate project — see Store Setup. The two can coexist (content site at yourdomain.com, store at shop.yourdomain.com is a common pattern), or you can replace the static site with a platform-backed e-commerce site when the time comes. Either way, the work I do here doesn't lock you in.

Track Record

Examples

The site you're reading right now is a working example: hand-coded HTML/CSS, no framework, deployed on Cloudflare Pages, scores 99/100/100/100 on Lighthouse, fully accessible, mobile-first. Everything from the navigation to the schema markup to the lead forms was built the same way I'd build yours.

For a more involved example: I built Titan Machine Service — a Tulsa CNC repair company — as a custom static site with urgency-segmented lead capture, location pages for SEO, and JSON-LD structured data for local search. Live and serving real dispatch traffic. Different audience, same approach.

I also have 25 years of front-end and full-stack experience — JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Java, Node.js, AWS, Cloudflare, the whole spectrum. Most small-business work doesn't need any of that complexity, and the hardest discipline is knowing when not to use it.

Want a website that doesn't suck?

Free 30-minute consultation. Send me whatever you've got — current site, sketches, a competitor you like, or just a description of what you're trying to do. We'll figure out the right scope together.

Book a Free Consultation Or send a message