Web Design · 2026-08-11

Our Web Design Process, Honestly — Discover, Plan, Make, Deliver

Most agency "process" pages are four icons and a lot of confident nouns. You finish reading them knowing exactly as much as when you started, which is the point — mystery protects the margin.

We'd rather tell you what happens, including the awkward parts. Here's the whole thing: four stages, what we do, what we need from you, and where projects actually go sideways.

Stage 1 — Discover

What happens: You fill out the free assessment. It's a handful of questions about your business, your customers, and what you want the site to do. No phone tag, no forty-minute discovery call before anyone will name a price.

We read it, look at what you have now, look at who you're up against in your market, and come back with a recommendation and a written estimate. Not a range — a number, tied to a named scope.

What we need from you: honesty about the goal. "I want more phone calls from homeowners in my county" produces a different site than "I need to look credible when I email a proposal." Both are legitimate. They are not the same site, and guessing wrong costs a revision round.

How long: usually a day or two to get the estimate back to you.

Stage 2 — Plan

What happens: You e-sign the estimate online — no printing, no scanning, no wet signature mailed to Colorado. Projects of $1,500 or more can start with a 50% deposit, with the balance due at final delivery. You can pay by card, bank transfer, or Cash App, or spread it with Klarna.

The moment that clears, your client portal opens. That's where the project lives from here: milestones, file uploads, proofs, approvals, and the running answer to "where are we?" You don't have to email anyone to find out.

Then we build the plan itself — sitemap, what goes on each page, what the site is asking visitors to do. For a five-section single-page build that's quick. For an eight-page build it's the part that determines whether the site works.

What we need from you: the domain. Ideally already registered in your business name, in an account you can log into. If it's stuck with a previous developer or a relative who set it up in 2014, tell us in week one, because untangling registrar access can take longer than the design.

Stage 3 — Make

What happens: Design and build. You see real work — actual pages in a browser, not a picture of a website — because a flat mockup lies about how things behave when they move, load, and get thumbed at on a phone.

Then revisions, in rounds. A round is one consolidated pass of your feedback, not one email. Our $2,500 package includes two rounds; the $6,500 package includes three. Both numbers are printed on the shop page and on your estimate.

The reason we count rounds isn't stinginess. It's that unbounded feedback trickling in over six weeks produces a worse site than two decisive passes. Sit with the whole thing, gather every note from everyone whose opinion matters, send it once. You'll get a better result and so will we.

What we need from you: your materials. This is the stall. Read the next section.

The step where projects actually die

Not design. Not budget. Materials.

Logo files, photos of your work, your license numbers, the list of services with the way you describe them, staff names spelled right, the address and hours you want public. Every project that runs long runs long here, and it's usually three weeks lost to "I've got to find the photos off my old phone."

The fix takes an hour and you can do it before you hire anyone:

1. Make one folder. Call it "website stuff." Everything goes in it.
2. Dump in the best 20 photos of finished work you have. Phone photos are fine. Blurry ones are not.
3. Write your services as a plain list, one line each, in your own words. Bad writing beats no writing — we can fix the words, we cannot invent your services.
4. Find the highest-resolution logo file you own. If the best you have is a JPG pulled off Facebook, say so now, not at proofing.
5. Note your Google Business Profile login, your domain registrar login, and any review links you want featured.

Do that and your project runs on the timeline you were quoted. Skip it and no amount of process discipline on our end saves the schedule.

Stage 4 — Deliver

What happens: We launch. Redirects from old URLs get set so your existing search rankings don't fall in a hole. Search Console gets connected, the sitemap gets submitted, analytics starts collecting. Forms get tested end to end — meaning someone submits the real form and confirms the message lands in your real mailbox, because a form that fails silently is worse than no form.

On final payment, everything is yours. Files, designs, source, all of it. No lock-in, and nothing held hostage.

What happens after: the first year of hosting is included with every build. After that it's $29/month, flat — the same $29 in month sixty as in month one. If you want us actively working on the site rather than just keeping it up, Care is $79 and Growth is $199, also flat.

Who you're actually talking to

You work directly with the designer and developer doing the work. No account manager translating your feedback into a ticket, no hand-off to a subcontractor in another time zone, no "let me check with the team." When you ask a question, the person answering is the person who wrote the thing you're asking about.

That's a small studio's real advantage, and it's also its constraint — we take on what we can do properly. If your project needs more than that, we'll tell you during Discover instead of after the deposit.

What working with us looks like

Start with the free assessment. You'll have a recommendation and a real number in a couple of days, with the scope, the revision count, and the recurring cost all written down before you commit to anything.

If you're mid-project with someone else and can't get a straight answer about which stage you're in — that's not you being impatient. Ask for the sitemap and the revision count in writing. Those two documents end most of these arguments.