Common questions
Questions about working with us
Costs and timelines live on the pricing page. This covers everything else: how the work runs, what we need from you, and what happens after the site is live.
What happens between "I might need a website" and work beginning.
Getting started
What happens on the first call?
We ask what the business does, where the work currently comes from, and what you want the site to change. Twenty to thirty minutes, no deck. At the end you get a straight recommendation, including the tier we think fits and whether we think you should spend less than you were planning to. If the honest answer is that a site builder covers you, we say that.
Do I need my content written before we start?
No, but the project moves at the speed of whoever is slowest on content. Rough notes are enough to begin. We write and shape the copy from those, then you approve it. What does hold things up is a blank page with nobody assigned to fill it, which is why the pre-flight list puts your service list near the top.
What do you actually need from me on day one?
Access to your domain registrar, whatever you use for email, your logo files, photos, and one person named as the decision maker. The domain login is the item that blocks launch day if it is left late, so it is worth checking you can sign in before anything else.
Can you work with my existing logo?
Yes. Send the original vector file if it exists, a PNG with a transparent background if it does not. We build the color system around the logo rather than the other way around. We do not redraw a logo you are happy with just to make the site look more like our other work.
Do you take on one-person businesses and nonprofits?
Yes. Several of the sites in our portfolio belong to businesses run by one or two people. Our smallest tier exists for exactly that: $1,500 for a clean five-page site, financed at $63 a month if paying it at once is not realistic.
Design, approvals and the parts people worry about most.
During the build
What if I do not like the first design?
Then we change it. The first design is a starting position, not a verdict, and telling us it is wrong on day four is far cheaper than telling us on day twelve. Specific feedback is worth more than polite feedback. "The headline is too small and the blue is wrong" moves faster than "it needs more energy".
How many rounds of changes are included?
There is no numbered allowance. Changes within a stage, before you approve that stage, are part of the build. Once you have signed off on a stage, going back and redoing it is a change request, which our terms set at a minimum of $500 plus our $250 hourly rate. That structure exists to make approvals mean something, not to catch you out. We will always tell you before something crosses the line.
Can I see the site before it goes live?
Yes, on a real URL, in your own browser, on your own phone. Not a flat image of a page. You are approving something you can click, because a design that reads well as a picture and badly as a website is a common and expensive surprise.
Who takes the photos?
You do, in most cases, and phone photos of real work beat stock images of nobody. We handle cropping, formats and sizing. If the business genuinely needs professional photography we will say so and help you brief a photographer, but we do not bundle a shoot into the price and hope you do not notice.
Will it work properly on phones?
Every site we build is designed at phone width first and checked at 375, 768 and 1280 pixels before launch. Most Alaska local search happens on a phone, often on a poor connection, so the phone version is the real version and the desktop one is the adaptation.
What happens if the project stalls on my end?
Life happens and short delays are normal. The threshold in our terms is four weeks: if a project is held up longer than that by something on your side, restarting carries a $1,000 fee, because the slot has to be rebuilt from scratch. Tell us early if something has come up. A planned pause is easier to work around than silence.
How the money actually moves, and what the fees in the terms mean in practice.
Payments and terms
How do payments actually work?
Two options. Pay upfront and take 25% off the tier price, with a deposit to start and the balance on completion. Or finance it: 23 monthly payments at the advertised rate, then a smaller final payment so the total lands exactly on the published figure. The first monthly payment is due before work begins and each one after that falls on the same day of the month.
Why 23 payments and a final one instead of 24 equal payments?
Because the advertised monthly figure is the total divided by 24 and rounded up to a whole dollar, and 24 of those rounded payments would collect slightly more than the price we published. Twenty three at the advertised rate plus a smaller final payment lands on the exact total. It is a difference of about ten dollars, and a contract that quietly overcharges by ten dollars is still a contract that overcharges.
What counts as out of scope?
Anything not in the tier scope you signed, and anything you approved and then want redone. New pages beyond the tier limit, a feature nobody discussed, an integration that appears in week two. Out-of-scope work is quoted before it starts, never after, at a minimum $500 change request fee plus $250 an hour.
What is the 25% upfront discount, exactly?
A quarter off the tier total for paying without financing. $1,500 becomes $1,125, $3,997 becomes $2,998, $9,997 becomes $7,498, $39,997 becomes $29,998. Paying upfront also means the site is yours outright on completion instead of transferring at the end of the payment term. Full figures on the pricing page.
What if a payment fails?
A first failed attempt costs nothing and we will contact you. A $35 fee applies to a second failed attempt on the same payment. If an account goes properly overdue we may pause hosting, but we will never hold your domain or your files. Those are yours and we release them on request, overdue or not.
Do you charge for third-party tools?
Only if you ask us to buy and manage them for you, in which case a 20% management fee applies on top of what the tool costs. You are always free to hold those subscriptions yourself in your own account, and for most clients that is the better arrangement.
The switchover, and what happens once the site is live.
Launch and afterwards
Will my email keep working when the site launches?
Yes, provided we know where it lives before we touch DNS. Your website and your email can run on the same domain from completely different services, and the records that route mail are separate from the ones that route web traffic. Tell us on day one whether you use Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 or something a previous provider set up. This is the highest-consequence detail in the whole switchover and it takes you five minutes to answer.
What happens to my old website?
It stays live until the new one is ready, then we point the domain across. Any page on the old site that carried traffic gets a redirect to the matching new page, so links and rankings follow the move instead of dying at a 404. We keep a copy of the old site for you as well. Nothing gets deleted on launch day.
Do you set up Google Analytics and Search Console?
Yes, both, connected to accounts in your name rather than ours. We submit the sitemap at launch and check indexing in the weeks after. If you already have them running on an old site, get us access before the rebuild rather than after, because the existing data tells us which pages must keep their URLs.
How do I make changes after launch?
Depends on the tier. Pages that are meant to change regularly get a content system you can edit yourself. Structural changes come to us. For occasional work we sell support in blocks of five hours at the standard rate, and unused hours roll over for four months rather than expiring at the end of the month.
What if something breaks at nine at night?
Call. Our published hours are 8:00 AM to 9:30 PM every day, including weekends, and that is a real number rather than a marketing one. Site down or a form not sending is the kind of thing we would rather hear about immediately than read in a review later.
Will there be a credit link to you in my footer?
Our terms reserve the right to a small project credit in the footer, and most of our sites carry one. If you would rather not have it, say so and we will leave it off. We would rather ask than have you find it after launch and feel you were not told.
Who you are dealing with and how we fit around what you already have.
Working with us
Who actually does the work?
You deal directly with the person building your site. There is no account manager relaying messages to a team you never meet, and nothing is sent offshore. The practical difference is speed: a question about the layout gets answered by the person who wrote the layout, usually the same day.
Do you sign NDAs?
Yes, and our standard terms already include mutual confidentiality, so both sides are covered before anything extra is signed. If your business has its own agreement, send it over.
Can you help with my Google Business Profile?
Yes, and for a local business it is usually the highest-value hour available anywhere, ahead of anything on the website itself. We will audit the profile, fix what is wrong and connect it properly to the site. The specific things that go wrong are in our post on profile mistakes.
What is the difference between on-page and off-page SEO?
On-page is everything on your own website: page structure, headings, titles, schema, speed, internal links, the words themselves. It is included with every build because a site without it is a site that will not be found. Off-page is everything happening elsewhere: citations, local links, reviews, mentions. That is ongoing work rather than a one-time build task, and we sell it separately at $600 a month.
What if I already have a designer or a marketing person?
That is usually a better project, not a worse one. We will build to their designs or take direction from your marketing lead. What we ask for is one clear decision maker, because a design owned by two people with different opinions costs the project a week per disagreement.
Can you fix a site somebody else built?
Often, yes. Speed problems, broken forms, structural SEO gaps and accessibility issues are all fixable in place, and doing that is usually cheaper than starting again. Sometimes the honest answer is that the platform is the problem and patching it is money spent twice. We will tell you which one it is before you commit to anything.