Website design in DuPage County, IL, and exactly what exists at the end of it.

A website is not one object. It is about seven.

The reason so many owners end up stuck with a provider they have stopped liking is that they only ever received one of the seven. The pages arrived. The accounts underneath them stayed somewhere else.

So a build here hands over a set of separate working pieces, each sitting in an account with your name on it rather than ours.

• A domain, bought into a registrar account that belongs to you
• The site itself, built page by page around what you sell rather than poured into a layout
• Google Workspace email at that domain, so a reply comes from you at your own address instead of a free inbox
• A Google Calendar, which the booking page on Growth is permitted to write into
• A Google Business Profile, verified and filled the whole way in
• Service pages, which are what the local search work actually runs on
• A customer list, from the week there is one worth keeping

The first month, in the order it genuinely happens.

None of this takes a year. What takes time is waiting on somebody, so the sequence is arranged to keep as much of the waiting as possible on our side.

• Week one is paperwork and it is the least interesting part — domain moved or bought into your name, email set up, the Google profile claimed or prised back from whoever has it, and an hour spent listening to how your work really arrives.
• Week two the pages get written and built, with each service named the way a customer names it out loud.
• Week three you read all of it and say what is wrong. Everybody has something, and this is the week that exists for it.
• Week four it goes live, booking is switched on, the profile is completed properly, and the search work starts running to a schedule.

What we need from you, and it is less than people brace for.

Owners delay this because they picture a folder of homework. In practice there are four things, and we can start with three of them.

• Your prices, or an honest range plus the thing that moves it
• Photographs off your own phone — the room, the work, the vehicle, you
• The questions people ask on the phone before they commit
• One hour, once, at the beginning, on the premises or on a call

One update a month, and what that covers in practice.

It appears in every plan and it is the line owners are most suspicious of, so here is the unglamorous version. An update is a change to something that already exists: a price, an opening hour, a paragraph, a photograph, a service you have stopped offering, somebody who has left.

Send it however suits you — a text, an email, a photograph of a printed sheet with a pen mark on it. No ticket number stands between you and a paragraph, and nobody books a meeting about one.

One a month is a ceiling and not a target. Plenty of months go by without one, and the number is really there to remove the reason a wrong price sits on a page for a year, which is the suspicion that asking will turn into an ordeal.

New work is a different thing and we name it rather than blur it. A whole new section, a shop, a second location with pages of its own — that gets quoted against the job and put in writing before anybody starts.

Four questions worth putting to anybody who quotes you.

You are probably reading two or three of these pages this week and ours is one of them. These four separate the arrangements quickly, and we would rather you asked them of us as well.

• Whose account is the domain registered in, and can I log into it today?
• When I want something changed, who does it reach and how long does it take?
• What is included every month, listed in nouns rather than adjectives?
• What does it cost to leave, and what comes with me when I do?

Both prices, and the reason the term is a year.

Foundation is $250 a month with a one-time $250 to build it. Growth is $500 a month with a one-time $500, and turns on booking synced to your Google Calendar and the ledger underneath — invoicing, card payments, the automatic messages, expenses, monthly reports and the accounting sync.

Twelve months settled at once removes 15 percent, so the year lands at $2,550 or $5,100 and the build stays on a line of its own. Two extras can sit on top of either plan: phone answering around the clock at $100 a month, automated Google review replies at $130.

The term is twelve months because roughly the first three of them pass before a new site pays for anything, and an agreement designed to be abandoned in week six tends to produce a build designed the same way. The commitment runs in both directions, which is worth saying out loud. It is not a lock, though. If you want out early, tell us in writing: you pay the current month plus one more, and the domain, the Google profile and the customer list leave with you.

When a cheap template is honestly the right answer.

The usual version of this advice asks whether you enjoy fiddling with software on a Sunday. Here is a better test, and it has nothing to do with temperament.

Look at where last year's work came from. If the truthful answer is two general contractors, a few property managers and a brother-in-law, then search is not how your business arrives, and paying anybody to improve it is buying a cure for a condition you do not have. Put something small and cheap up, keep the phone number correct on it, and spend the difference on a vehicle.

The same holds if you are three years from handing the place on, or if you are already turning work away and would rather keep your evenings than fill them. We would sooner set that out here than discover it together in month four.