Service · Web Design
A website written for your business, not assembled from someone else's template
Hand-coded PHP, CSS, and HTML written from scratch — no page-builder templates, no third-party subscription, no mystery scripts running in the background. Every file is built for your specific business: your services, your service area, your conversion goals. You own it outright the day it launches. Starting at $1,200 for a single-page site and $2,800 for multi-page. Not sure how many pages you need? See the guide →
What a small business website needs to generate inquiries
There's a meaningful difference between a website that exists and one that produces leads. The gap between them isn't design taste: it's structure. Wrong page architecture, missing trust signals, forms that lose leads, and pages that load too slowly for Google to rank them are the culprits on almost every underperforming small business site. Here's what needs to be in place before anything else matters.
Individual pages for every service you offer
A single "Services" page that lists everything is one of the most common structural mistakes on small business sites, with serious consequences for Google rankings. Search engines rank individual pages, not websites. When you have one page trying to rank for roofing, gutters, siding, and window replacement simultaneously, it competes weakly across all of them and wins on none. Each service you offer is a distinct keyword with its own searcher intent: someone searching "roof repair [city]" is not interchangeable with someone searching "new roof installation [city]." A dedicated page for each service ranks independently, answers questions specific to that job, and converts at a higher rate because the visitor landed on exactly what they're looking for. Most local competitors haven't built these pages, leaving a ranking gap that a properly structured site can capture.
A contact or intake form that captures leads at any hour
Most people who find your business online and decide they want to reach out do so in the evening or on weekends, not during the hours when you can answer a phone. A phone number alone loses every one of those leads the moment they hit voicemail. A well-built contact form captures the inquiry while the person is motivated, gives them a clear expectation of when you'll respond, and routes the submission directly to your email. There are no third-party form services involved, no submissions sitting in someone else's database. Rate limiting and bot protection keep the spam out without making legitimate contacts jump through hoops. For businesses that need triage information before calling back (what kind of job is it, what's the approximate size, what city), the form collects that so you're not calling back cold into a conversation you know nothing about yet.
Trust signals that answer the vetting question before it's asked
Before a first-time visitor submits their contact information, they're doing a quick credibility check. How long have you been in business? Are you licensed and insured? Do you serve their area? Do other customers say good things? These aren't questions they'll ask you directly — they're things they want to see answered on the page without having to dig. License numbers, certifications, years in business, service area coverage, and client reviews all need to be visible in the page layout, not buried in fine print at the bottom. A trust signal that takes work to find doesn't function as a trust signal. The businesses that convert well on organic traffic surface these elements prominently and specifically — not "licensed and insured" as a vague claim, but an actual license number and a named insurance carrier for the trades that require it.
Search engine optimization built in from the start
Search engine optimization isn't something you bolt onto a finished website. How your pages are structured, the headlines Google shows in search results, the hidden labels that tell Google what your business does and where you serve — all of that is either built right from day one or it's struggling against the odds from day one. Every multi-page build includes the full foundation: unique, search-friendly page titles and descriptions that tell Google and visitors what each page is about, hidden business labels that can get your business shown with star ratings or your phone number directly in search results, a complete roadmap of your pages submitted to Google, and setup in Google's own monitoring dashboard so you can see which searches bring visitors to your site. The pages are ready for search engines the moment they go live — no months of waiting for Google to discover a new site on its own.
Fast mobile load — not as an extra, as the baseline
Google now decides where your site ranks based on how it performs on a phone, not on a desktop. A site that takes five seconds to load on a phone is penalized in rankings whether the desktop version loads fast or not. Template-builder sites load slowly on mobile because they're packed with background code that doesn't need to be there: every feature the platform offers, every add-on the builder installed, all of it downloads to every visitor's phone regardless of whether they use it. A hand-coded site delivers only what a specific page needs to show. Nothing extra. Nothing unused. The result is a page that loads in under two seconds on typical mobile connections — which isn't a technical achievement, it's just what a website looks like when it isn't burdened with unnecessary code. See the full picture at mobile-first design →
Ownership structure with no strings attached
A site you don't fully own is a dependency that grows more expensive over time. Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, and similar platforms keep the code, the server, and the infrastructure. If the platform raises prices, removes a feature, or shuts down a product, your options are whatever the platform allows. A hand-coded site is delivered as files: PHP, CSS, HTML, and any database behind it. You can move it to any host, hand it to any developer, or edit it yourself. No transfer fees, no permission required, no code written in a proprietary format that only one platform understands. The managed hosting ArdinGate offers after launch is month-to-month specifically because your hosting relationship should be based on whether you're getting value, not on whether you're trapped.
What a business owner checks before hiring a web designer (and what most web design sites fail)
Hiring a web designer is a purchase made almost entirely on trust and evidence, because the buyer usually can't evaluate the technical work directly. A restaurant owner doesn't know whether PHP is better than WordPress. A gym owner can't tell clean code from bloated code by looking at it. So they evaluate the signals they can read. Here's how that evaluation actually happens, and where the majority of web design marketing sites stumble through it.
The designer's own site is the first portfolio piece
Before a prospect looks at a portfolio, they look at the designer's own site through the lens of a potential client. Does it load fast? Does the mobile layout work on a phone, or does it have the horizontal overflow problem that kills usability on small screens? Is the copy specific and confident, or does it sound like it was written for every designer in the world? A web designer whose personal site is slow, mobile-broken, or itself built on a Wix or Squarespace template (which a surprising portion of "custom design" agencies use) has answered the core capability question before the conversation started. This site is hand-coded in the same PHP stack used for every client build. The load time you experienced here is what clients get. That's not a differentiator — it's a baseline requirement for credibility in this line of work.
Portfolio links get clicked, not just screenshots reviewed
After the designer's own site passes inspection, a prospect will look at portfolio examples and, critically, they'll click through to see if the sites are still live. A portfolio of screenshots only, or with dead links, raises a real question: why are those sites gone? What they want to see is a live site they can open on their own phone and evaluate the same way they just evaluated the designer's site. They're looking for whether each client's site has its own visual identity and structure, or whether all the portfolio pieces clearly came from the same underlying template with swapped colors and different logos. Template-based output has a distinctive sameness that's legible even to non-designers after seeing two or three examples side by side. Custom work doesn't share that structural fingerprint.
Testimonials about the process matter more than praise about the result
Web design testimonials are almost universally positive about the finished product, which gives a prospect very little information because they expect testimonials to be curated positively. What separates a credible testimonial from a generic one is whether it describes the working process: did the timeline hold? Were questions answered promptly? When revisions were needed, did that happen cleanly or was it a struggle? A business owner who has been burned by a web designer before (which is more common than web designers would like to think) is listening specifically for signals about the experience of working with someone, not just the output they produced. "The site looks professional" does nothing. "We had a scope, we hit the date, and the one thing we needed to change after launch was fixed the next day" is a completely different kind of signal.
Pricing opacity kills inquiries before they start
Web design pricing is famously opaque, and that opacity actively costs designers leads. A business owner who can't find any pricing information on a web design site knows one thing for certain: they'll have to talk to someone before they know what this costs. That's a friction point that many prospects won't cross. They'll move to a competitor who publishes at least a starting price and a clear explanation of what affects the final number. The pricing section and FAQ on this page are written to remove that uncertainty before it creates hesitation. You know the starting point for both site types, what pushes the price up, and what's included in the base price before you send a single message. If after reading all of that the project still sounds right, the inquiry process is about fit and scope, not about nervously asking "so what does this cost?"
The path from Google search to booked client — and where most sites lose people along the way
The journey from "someone searched for a business like yours" to "that person submitted a contact form" has more failure points than most business owners have mapped out. Each one of the structural decisions in a web design project — how many pages, what goes on each page, where the contact form lives, how the mobile layout works — maps directly to one of those failure points. This is what that path looks like, and where the problems happen.
It starts with search. Someone searches "electrician [city]" or "physical therapist near me" or your business name after a friend mentioned you. For the organic search result to lead to your page, you need the right page to exist. A home page or a generic "Services" page competing for a specific service query has almost no path to the first page of Google results. A dedicated service page with the right title, original content specific to that service, and structured data identifying your business type has a realistic shot, especially in smaller and mid-size markets where most competitors haven't built those pages yet. The structure of the site determines which searches it can even compete for. This is decided at build time, not after the fact.
From the search result, the prospect lands on your page and makes three rapid judgments in the first twenty to thirty seconds: does this business handle what I need, does it look like it knows what it's doing, and is there an obvious next step. Specific service page content answers the first question. A clean, fast-loading layout with visible credentials answers the second. A clearly visible contact form or call to action above the fold answers the third. Template sites routinely fail the second judgment because they look structurally identical to competitors, and fail the third because the contact action is buried below three sections of marketing copy written for a general audience.
The funnel breaks most reliably at two points. The first is mobile load time. A page that takes five or more seconds to load on a phone loses a large share of visitors before the content even appears, and they rarely come back. The second is the after-hours contact gap. A prospect who decides they want to reach out at 9pm on a Saturday and sees only a phone number will usually not call. They'll fill a form if one exists and they trust where the form goes, or they'll keep looking. A contact form with a clear response time commitment ("I respond within one business day") closes that gap. Not because it's a nice-to-have feature, but because it's the mechanism that converts a motivated prospect into an actual inquiry when you're not available to pick up the phone.
Why a page-builder template can't differentiate a business that competes on trust
Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy Website Builder, Divi, and Elementor all offer templates that look professionally designed in a screenshot. The issue isn't how any single one looks in isolation. The issue is what they do structurally to every business built on them, and what that means when a potential client is comparing you to a competitor.
Every business that uses the same template shares the exact same bone structure underneath: where the hero photo sits, where the testimonials appear, how sections flow down the page, where the footer goes. These are fixed by the template and only change visually from one business to the next — colors shift, logos swap, photos update, but the skeleton stays identical. Someone who's visited three or four sites built on the same platform will sense that sameness even if they can't quite name it. In competitive markets where a prospect is comparing multiple businesses side-by-side, that sense of "came from a kit" is a real problem. It's not useful when you're trying to convince someone to trust you with a legal matter, a medical service, a major home renovation, or their finances.
The performance problem is separate but compounds the differentiation problem. Template platforms load a mountain of backend code on every page: the machinery that runs the drag-and-drop editor, styling rules for every possible element regardless of what's actually on the page, and every add-on installed regardless of whether the page uses it. An expert who knows the platform inside-out can optimize this down to acceptable load times. A business owner who built the site and left the technical settings at defaults typically ends up with a page that takes four to eight seconds on a phone — well above the speed threshold where Google penalizes it in rankings, and well above where most visitors wait before giving up and moving on.
There's also the ownership issue. A site on Wix is Wix's site with your content in it. Wix controls the server, the code, and the pricing. If they double the subscription cost, change the feature set you depend on, or shut down a product tier, your leverage is zero. A hand-coded site is yours — files on a server that you control, code that any PHP developer can read and continue. See the full breakdown: custom code vs. Wix and Squarespace →
Pricing
Single-page websites start at $1,200 and most land in the $1,200–$2,200 range. A single-page site is the right scope when you need a professional presence with your core services, contact information, and a form — and don't need individual pages for separate service lines. It's a common starting point for solo operators, new businesses, or established businesses that get most inquiries through referrals and just need a site that confirms credibility when someone looks them up. Technical SEO setup on a single-page build is a $300 add-on.
Multi-page sites start at $2,800 and most land in the $2,800–$5,000 range. This covers three to six pages: home, individual service pages (two to four services with dedicated pages), about or team, and contact. Technical SEO setup is included at no extra charge: service page title tags and meta descriptions, LocalBusiness or Service structured data, Google Search Console configuration, XML sitemap, and robots.txt. What pushes a build toward the higher end: more individual service pages, a custom intake form with conditional logic or multi-step routing, integration with third-party scheduling or payment software, or a competitive industry where the copy requires deeper research into what actually converts in that market.
Optional managed hosting starts at $30/month: SSL renewal, nightly backups, and uptime monitoring. Plans with monthly content edits start at $50/month. No long-term contract: cancel any time with 30 days' written notice. Add-on services include online booking integration, payment processing, and secure client portals.
Custom web design questions
How much does a custom website cost?
Single-page websites start at $1,200, with most single-page builds landing in the $1,200–$2,200 range depending on feature scope. Multi-page sites with individual pages per service, a contact or intake form, and full technical SEO setup start at $2,800 and run $2,800–$5,000 for builds with four or more pages. Every quote is itemized upfront — no hourly billing that compounds, no hidden fees for SSL or domain configuration, no "that part costs extra" conversations after you've already approved the scope. What pushes a build toward the higher end: more service pages, a custom intake form with conditional logic, third-party integrations (booking, payments), or competitive industries where the copy requires deeper research to work. Optional managed hosting starts at $30/month for uptime monitoring, nightly backups, and SSL; plans with monthly content edits start at $50/month. Full detail: full pricing →
What's the difference between a hand-coded website and a page builder like Wix or Squarespace?
Page builders generate code loaded with platform overhead, third-party scripts, and plugin dependencies that slow load times and create lock-in you don't notice until you want to leave. When you build on Wix or Squarespace, you're renting a site you don't own: a monthly subscription is required to keep it online, you can't take the code files if the platform changes pricing or shuts down a tier, and performance is limited by what the platform's infrastructure allows, not what your business needs. A hand-coded site is different at the foundation level: clean PHP, CSS, and HTML written specifically for your project, no unused framework overhead, no monthly platform fee. You own the code outright. You can move to any host, hand the project to any developer, or keep it in place indefinitely without asking anyone's permission. Full comparison: custom code vs. Wix and Squarespace →
Do I need separate pages for each service I offer?
For getting found on Google, yes — separate service pages make a significant difference. Search engines rank individual pages, not websites as a whole. When all your services live on one page, that page is trying to rank for every keyword at once and ranks well for none of them. Each service you offer is a distinct search term that someone is typing with a specific intent: a person searching "emergency roof repair" has a different problem than someone searching "new roof cost estimate." A dedicated page for each service can rank independently for its own set of searches, answers the specific questions someone searching for that service is asking, and converts at a higher rate because the page is directly relevant to why they clicked. In most local markets, the majority of competitors have not done this yet. That structural gap is a real ranking opportunity for businesses that build the right pages. Guide: what pages a website needs →
Is SEO included in the website build?
Technical SEO is included with every multi-page build. In plain terms, that means: every page gets its own unique title (the text that appears in Google search results) written to match what people search for, not just a copy of the page headline. Every page gets a description that appears under that title in search results. Behind-the-scenes labeling is added that tells Google specifically what your business is, what you offer, and where you serve (this is the kind of labeling that can get your business shown with a star rating or phone number directly in the search result). A roadmap file is submitted to Google so it knows all your pages exist and can index them quickly. The site is connected to Google Search Console so you can see which searches lead people to your site and whether Google has any concerns. For single-page builds, this setup is a $300 add-on. Ongoing content SEO (writing additional pages over time to target more keywords) is a separate engagement, but the technical foundation above is in place from day one. Details: what's included in SEO setup →
Can the site include a contact or intake form?
Yes, and for most service businesses this is the most important feature on the site. A contact form captures inquiries at 10pm on a Sunday when you can't answer a call. A phone number alone loses those leads permanently. Forms are built to route directly to your email — no third-party form service like Typeform or JotForm collecting your submissions in their database. Spam protection blocks bots from filling your inbox with garbage while still letting legitimate contacts through without jumping through hoops like picture puzzles. For businesses that need to know something before calling back (what type of job is it, what's the location, is it commercial or residential), the form is built to collect that information upfront. For sensitive professional inquiries — legal, medical, financial — the form handling reflects that sensitivity: no personal information is stored beyond what's needed to deliver the message to your inbox.
How does local SEO work for a hand-coded website?
Local search works through two separate systems that reinforce each other but run independently. The first is Google Business Profile, which controls the map results — the three business listings with star ratings that appear at the top when someone searches "plumber near me." Your website has limited influence here; those rankings are driven primarily by your Google Business Profile completeness, your review count and recency, and how active your profile is. The second system is organic search results (the regular blue-link results below the map pack) for service-plus-location searches like "HVAC contractor [city]." These rankings are directly influenced by your website: dedicated service pages, business information structured so Google can read it clearly, your business name and address consistent across every page, how fast the site loads, and how well it works on a phone. The technical SEO included with every multi-page build covers all the on-site factors for the second system. Getting strong in the map pack, in competitive markets, requires running an active Google Business Profile strategy alongside it.
What software integrations are available?
The most common integrations for small business sites are online booking, payment processing, CRM intake, and email marketing. For booking, the approach depends on what you're already using: Calendly, Acuity, Jane, Mindbody, and Vagaro all have embed options that can be built into the site cleanly. For payments, Stripe, PayPal, and Square are supported with server-side order handling — not just a payment button that bounces the customer to another site. For field service and professional service businesses using Jobber, ServiceTitan, Clio, PracticePanther, or similar platforms, the site's intake form can route directly into those workflows. For email marketing, form submissions can automatically subscribe contacts to a Mailchimp, Klaviyo, or Resend list. The guiding principle is always to use the integration method the target platform supports best — no workarounds that break when the platform releases an update. Details: online booking integration →
How long does a website build take?
Single-page sites are completed in one to two weeks from the point where content is ready: what services you offer, your contact information, your service area, and any photos you want on the site. Multi-page builds with individual service pages, an intake form, and full SEO setup take three to six weeks depending on page count and how smoothly content review cycles go on your end. Every quote includes a specific completion date, not an optimistic estimate that quietly slips. The single biggest factor that delays projects is content availability — a build where you have all the information and photos ready on day one finishes significantly faster than one where content comes in gradually as the build progresses. If you have a hard deadline (a business opening, a seasonal push, a trade show), mention it upfront because it affects scheduling and whether a rush timeline is feasible.
Who owns the website after it's built?
You own everything, with no strings attached. The PHP files, the CSS, the HTML, the database if the site uses one, the images and all other assets — all of it transfers to you. There's no ongoing licensing fee to keep using what you paid to have built. There's no "you need to stay with me or the site goes offline" structure. Managed hosting from ArdinGate after launch is available month-to-month specifically because it should be something you keep because it's valuable, not because leaving is complicated. If you want to move to a different host, you transfer the files and you're done. If you want to hand the project to another developer — for any reason, at any time — they get the files and can continue the work immediately. No code obfuscation, no proprietary format, no permission required. You paid for a site, not a subscription with cancellation friction.
What does website maintenance include after launch?
Managed hosting starts at $30/month (the Core plan): SSL certificate renewal (the security certificate that keeps your site showing as safe in browsers), nightly backups with 30-day rolling retention so nothing is lost if something goes wrong, uptime monitoring that alerts me if the site goes down, and server-level security patching. It doesn't include content edits. The Care plan at $50/month adds one hour of content edits per month plus proactive application-level security patching — that covers most typical small business update needs: updating service descriptions, adding a new team member, swapping out photos, changing your hours or service area. The Priority plan at $75/month adds three hours of edits per month, same-day response on critical issues, a test environment for staging changes, and monthly analytics reports. For businesses that need more content changes than a plan covers, additional time is billed at a flat hourly rate. Every plan is month-to-month: cancel with 30 days' written notice and there's no cancellation fee. If you'd rather handle hosting yourself, every site comes with straightforward documentation on what the server needs to run it, so any hosting provider can take it from there. More details: what website maintenance includes →
Do you write the copy for the website, or do I?
Either works. If you want to write your own copy, I give you a content brief that lays out what each page needs: which sections to cover, what questions a visitor on that page is trying to answer, and what details separate a service description that converts from one that reads like a placeholder someone forgot to update. If you'd rather not write anything, I handle the copy — you answer questions about your business (what you do, who you serve, what makes you different, what the most common client situation is when they call), and I write the pages from those answers. Copy written for the site is built around what people in your specific industry are searching for and what they need to see to actually take the next step, not generic sentences that could describe any business in the category. You review drafts and confirm that everything is accurate to how you actually work; I handle the writing, revision, and final formatting into the page.
Will my site show up on Google, and how long does that take?
A site with proper technical SEO in place gets picked up by Google within days of launch once the sitemap is submitted to Search Console. Whether it reaches the first page of results for a specific search term depends on how competitive that search is in your market. For lower-competition local searches — a specialty trade in a smaller city, a professional practice in a suburb — a well-structured new site can reach page one within a few months. For high-competition markets (personal injury law in a major metro, HVAC in a city with 50 active competitors), reaching the first page takes longer and requires ongoing content work beyond the initial build. What the technical SEO setup included with every multi-page build does is make sure the site has a correct foundation — proper page structure, the right labeling for Google, fast load times, a clear sitemap — so that any ongoing work you do is building on something solid rather than trying to compensate for technical problems at the foundation level.
Can I update the site myself, or do I need to go through you for every change?
The default ArdinGate build requires editing the site's code files to make changes — something most business owners don't want to do themselves. If being able to update your own content is important to you (you post frequent news updates, you run events that change monthly, you want to be able to change your menu or service list without waiting on a developer), that's worth mentioning at the start of the project. A simple admin panel can be built into the site itself so you can update content through a form instead of editing code — not a full platform like WordPress with all its add-ons and update headaches, just a focused login interface for the specific things your site needs to change. Alternatively, if you update the site infrequently (maybe a few times a year), the Care hosting plan at $50/month includes one hour of edits per month that covers most typical small business update needs. The decision between these approaches affects how the site is built from the start, so it's best discussed before the scope is finalized.
Common industries I build for
Every build is custom regardless of industry, but some verticals come up more often and have dedicated pages covering what goes into a build for that specific field. Not sure what fits? Start with small business web design → or browse all industries →
Restaurants & food service
Online menus, reservation links, hours, delivery integration. Everything a diner looks for, fast and clean.
Restaurant web design →Contractors & home services
Service pages, quote request forms, photo galleries, local SEO signals. Sites built to generate leads.
Contractor web design →Law firms & legal services
Practice area pages, attorney bios, case intake forms, trust signals, and privacy-compliant contact handling.
Law firm web design →Service businesses & consultants
Agencies, practices, solo operators: clear positioning, a strong contact flow, and nothing extra to slow it down.
Start a project →Tell me what your business needs and I'll build a plan around it
Send a short description: what your business does, what you need the site to accomplish, and whether you have an existing site to replace. I'll respond within 5 business days with a realistic scope and a flat quote — no vague "it depends" until you've already committed to a conversation.
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