What a Lexington business actually needs from a website
Not much, done well. Somebody finds you on their phone, in a parking lot on Nicholasville Road, on a cell signal. They need to know what you do, where you are and how to reach you without scrolling.
The phone number has to be a button. The page has to load in about three seconds or a good chunk of them are gone before they saw your name. And the photos have to be your building, your truck and your work, because people in Lexington spot a stock photo instantly and everything else on the page gets less believable when they do.
That's it. Everything else, the animation, the clever headline, the color scheme, is in service of that, or it's decoration. I've written those four rules down and published them, and every site I build is tested against them before it goes live.
How I build it, and what it costs
By hand. I write the code. That's why the sites load fast and don't break when a plugin updates itself.
- A single-page site is $850 and takes one to two weeks.
- A five-page local business site, home, about, services, service area, contact, with multi-keyword SEO, Search Console set up and the right schema, is $2,600 and takes two to four weeks.
- Up to ten pages with a blog and town pages is $4,500.
- Stores and booking integrations are quoted after you and I have talked about what the site actually has to do.
- Every build carries the $100-a-month care plan, because there's no dashboard and keeping it current is my job.
The honest bottleneck on every build is photos and content from you, not the code. I'll tell you exactly what I need on day one.
You own all of it
Your domain is registered in your name. The site is yours.
You can walk away with it any day you like. Lexington has agencies that make that difficult on purpose; I've never held anybody's website hostage and I'm not going to start.
The four rules a Lexington site gets built to.
- Fast on a phone. About three seconds on a cell signal, measured, not assumed. It's the first thing the launch checklist tests.
- The answer above the fold. What you do, where you are, how to reach you, with no scrolling.
- One tap to call. The phone number is a button. A number somebody has to copy down is a number some of them won't dial.
- Real photos, never stock. Your work, your building, your people. Lexington customers can tell.
- Built by hand. No page builder, no plugin roulette. Code I wrote, that I can fix.
- Yours, outright. Domain in your name, files yours, no lock-in.
Web design in Lexington: the published numbers
| $850 | Single-page site, published price, plus $100/mo care |
|---|---|
| $2,600 | Five-page local business site with SEO and Search Console |
| 1–4 wks | The honest build time for those two |
Go look at the live sites on your phone.
I don't show mockups as proof. The work page links to real businesses with real sites I built, live right now. Load one on your phone, on a cell signal, and time it.
Tap the phone number. Look for a stock photo. That's the whole pitch, and you can check it before you ever call me.
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