Custom web development on a stack the business owns.
The standard WordPress + page-builder setup loads a huge amount of code before your customer sees a word of your content.
Every two years, a non-profit research team at Google measures the entire public web and publishes a report on which platforms produce the heaviest, slowest pages. WordPress with a page builder installed has been at the bottom of that report every year since it started running. The same business's hand-built site is reliably faster, and the gap is getting wider, not smaller, as page builders compete on features instead of restraint.
We choose tools that last ten years on a small business's budget, not whichever name is fashionable this quarter.
For marketing websites we use a modern open-source tool that produces almost no programming code on the visitor's end — the page is served as plain HTML, the way the web was originally built to work. Pages load fast on a phone in a parking lot with two bars of signal because there is almost nothing to load. For custom applications — the ones with logins, customer data, or live information — we use a different tool that earns the cost of its extra complexity by doing things plain HTML cannot. The customer database is a proper database, not a spreadsheet, because the alternative is regretting it later.
Every time we change a page, automated tools re-check that it still loads quickly, still works for people with screen readers, and still reads correctly to the programs that summarize the web for AI answers. If a change makes the page worse on any of those, the system blocks the change before it goes live.
The people who write content for the site edit it in a clean writing interface. There is no drag-and-drop page builder to wrestle with. There is no proprietary editor that locks you in. If you ever move off our platform, your content moves with you in a standard format that any other system can read.
Your domain, your files, your customer data, your backups — all in accounts your business owns. Day one.
Your domain name (the address customers type) is registered in your business's name at a registrar you log into directly — not held by us in some "agency account" we control. The website's files live in a storage account your business owns. The customer database is backed up to cloud storage your business pays for directly. If we part ways one day, the entire project leaves with you, fully working, with no goodbye fee or migration ransom. The exit terms are in every contract we sign.
Most marketing websites land between $12,000 and $35,000, depending on how much content you have to start with, whether the site needs to talk to your other systems (booking, invoicing, CRM), and how much of the visual design we are building from scratch. Moves from an existing WordPress site — including making sure every old page address still works so search rankings don't drop — typically come in between $8,000 and $20,000. Custom applications (anything beyond a brochure site) are quoted individually.
Every quote spells out what is in, what is out, and what would happen on the day you leave. About one in three audits ends with a recommendation not to rebuild at all — we say so on the audit page so it is part of the expectation, not a surprise at the end.
Candid Creative