Twenty minutes on the phone, or coffee somewhere in Plano if you would rather do it in person. We are not running a sales script — the call exists so we can tell you which package actually fits, which is often a smaller one than you came in expecting.

The questions are all about your business rather than your website: what you do, who calls you, what those callers usually ask first, and what separates an inquiry worth your time from one that wastes it. If you already have a site, we pull it up together and look at what is and is not working. If you have never had one, that is completely normal and changes nothing about how this goes.

You leave the call knowing the tier, the price and the rough dates. We follow up in writing the same day so nothing depends on either of us remembering the conversation correctly.

This is the step that decides whether you launch in seven days or fourteen. Not because it is hard, but because it is the only part that depends on you. The checklist is one page and you can send everything back by email — there is no portal to log into and no software to learn.

What we need is unglamorous: your logo in whatever file you have, photos of real work or your real premises, a list of services, your hours, and the cities you cover. Phone photos are fine and usually better than stock. If your logo only exists as a low-resolution image on an old business card, tell us and we will clean it up.

Writing is the part people stall on. If you send us bullet points, we turn them into the first draft and you edit from there — most owners find reacting to a draft far easier than facing a blank page.

While you gather, we handle the domain and DNS. If you already own a domain we point it; if you do not, we register one in your name, in your account.

We do not send flat mockups. You get a private link to the actual working site, which you can open on your phone, forward to your spouse, and show to the customer whose opinion you actually trust. What you are looking at is what will go live.

It is built mobile-first because that is where your customers are — most local-business traffic is someone standing in a parking lot with one thumb. Once the phone layout is right, we widen it for desktop, not the other way around.

The architecture is static: pre-built HTML with no database and no plugins. That is what produces the sub-second load times and the small attack surface, and it is why your hosting bill later is measured in single-digit dollars rather than tens.

On Smart and Summit, this is also where the AI concierge gets trained. We feed it your services, hours, service area and the questions you actually field, then we sit and try to break it — asking things it should refuse to answer — before you ever see it.

Send notes in whatever form suits you. A numbered email is easiest for us, but a voice memo or a phone call works fine — we would rather have your real reaction than a tidily formatted one.

We ask you to collect notes into one pass rather than sending them as they occur to you. It is not a rule to make life difficult: batched changes get made faster and with fewer mistakes than the same changes trickling in over three days. Scenic includes one round, Smart two and Summit three.

Everything is still movable at this stage — wording, photos, section order, colours. What tends to change most is copy, once you see your own words on a real page.

Before sign-off we run the checks you should not have to ask for: keyboard navigation, colour contrast, screen-reader labels, and a Google PageSpeed pass on both mobile and desktop. If something fails, we fix it before we hand the site to you rather than after.

Launch day is deliberately boring. We point the domain, confirm the SSL certificate, submit the site to Google and tune your Google Business Profile so the map listing and the website agree with each other — mismatched hours between the two is one of the most common and most invisible reasons a local business loses calls.

Then the paths separate. On Scenic and Smart, the site is yours: we hand over the source files and you own it outright. Because we do not host those tiers, Smart includes the Hosting Launch Class — a guided session walking you through putting the site live, connecting the domain, and what to do if something looks wrong six months from now. Scenic clients can add the same class for $29.

The class exists for an honest reason. Handing someone a finished site and a folder of files, then leaving them to work out hosting alone, is not a handover — it is an abandonment with extra steps. We would rather spend an hour making sure you can actually run the thing you paid for.

On Summit nothing is handed over at all, because we keep running it: hosting, SSL renewals, uptime monitoring, backups, priority updates and continuous AI upkeep are all part of the monthly plan.