Website design in Glen Ellyn, IL, built for your trade rather than around a template.

Built for your trade means the page already knows what you sell.

A template asks you to pour your business into a shape somebody drew for a wedding photographer — a big hero image, an About page, a contact form, and then you're on your own working out where the rest goes. That's backwards. The shape of a page should come from the way the work gets sold.

So a lawn and landscape site opens on the service area and the seasonal contract, because that's the actual decision. An auto shop leads with the three or four repairs people search by name, since somebody with a grinding brake isn't browsing. A nail salon needs a service menu and a wall of photographs — the pictures are the pitch. A chiropractor needs the first-visit page more than any other, because what's standing between the reader and an appointment is not knowing what happens in the room.

The six businesses in the Vault were built that way, one at a time, and yours gets built the same way — out of the questions your customers ask before they ever pick up the phone.

Phones come first, because that's where the decision gets made.

Nearly everyone who finds you is holding a phone, standing somewhere, with one thumb free. We design for that hand and let the desktop version be the easy case.

Your number sits where the thumb already is. Tap targets are big enough to hit while walking. Nothing needs pinching, nothing jumps under a finger as the page finishes loading, and your address opens straight into a map app. It's dull work nobody ever compliments — and it's the difference between a call and a back button.

Speed is something a visitor feels before reading a word.

Page builders stack four layers of software on top of your text and then ship all of it to a phone on one bar. We don't. Every page is trimmed by hand, images are cut to the slot they sit in, and there's no carousel doing calisthenics while somebody waits to learn whether you're open Sunday.

That's partly courtesy. It's also one of the few things about a website Google measures directly.

The domain is registered in your name and it leaves with you.

We put the domain in your account, not ours — same with the Google Business Profile and the customer list. Whatever happens between us, those three are yours and they go where you go.

Email comes with the domain. Google Workspace, so you're writing to customers as you@yourshop.com instead of from a Gmail address with your trade and a number stuck on the end. Mail you already have can move across, the calendar and the shared drive come along with it, and on Growth the booking system writes into that same calendar.

One update a month, and all you do is ask.

New price list, a photo of the truck, a holiday closing, a service you've stopped offering. Send it over and it gets done — one a month, included, with no ticket queue and no change-order form to sign.

Plenty of months you won't use it — the number isn't really the point. The point is that nothing on your site has to sit wrong for a year because fixing it means calling somebody who might call back.

When Squarespace is honestly the better call.

If you've got the time and the interest to run your own site, go run it. That software is cheap and it's good, and you'd be paying us to do something you'd rather do yourself.

The catch is everything the software leaves for you. You still write the pages, size the images, claim and fill out the Google profile, wire up booking, keep the hours honest, and fix whatever breaks at nine at night when it breaks. Foundation is $250 a month with a one-time $250 setup — and that gap is what the money buys. If doing all of it yourself sounds like a decent evening, we'd rather say so than sell you something.