You hold space beautifully. Your website should too.

Correct. Both are concept builds, labelled as such rather than dressed up as clients. What I charge right now is the lowest it will ever be — these prices reflect a studio at the beginning, not the work itself, and they rise as the portfolio fills in.

That's the trade: you take a chance on someone without twenty logos on the wall, and you get work well above what this budget buys anywhere else, at a rate that won't exist in a year — from someone who needs your site to be excellent, because it's what sets the next price.

You'll know long before it matters. You see a direction before I write a line of code — colours, type, layout, the feel of the thing — while it's still quick and cheap to change. If it's not right, I don't nudge it, I take another run at it properly.

That happens sometimes and it isn't a failure — sometimes you only work out what you want by seeing what you don't, and I'd rather find that out in week one on a mood board than week five on a built site. We keep going until you look at it and think yes, that's us.

Two at the design stage, two during the build — but rounds exist so a project can't drift forever, not so I can start charging you the moment you ask for a fifth thing. Small stuff — a word, a colour, a photo swap — I just do. What they actually protect against is the fourth complete change of direction in week five, the thing that kills small projects.

If we ever get near that line, I'll tell you plainly that we're near it and what it would cost to keep going. You will never open a surprise invoice.

No. Half to get started, half when the site goes live. The deposit is what turns a conversation into a project — it books the time and gets me writing — and the balance isn't due until you've seen the finished thing working properly.

If the total is uncomfortable in two pieces, say so on the call. Spreading it over a longer period alongside a care plan is something I do regularly — a normal conversation, not a favour you have to ask for.

Morbid. Fair. Your site is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript sitting in a repository you own — no proprietary system, no page builder only I know how to drive, no database that needs explaining. Any competent developer can open the folder and keep going, and that's genuinely not true of most of what you'd be quoted elsewhere.

On day one I set the domain and hosting up in your name, not mine. There's nothing to untangle later and nothing you'd have to ask my permission for — I'd rather you stayed because you wanted to.

No. The site is yours outright the day it launches — the code, the design, the domain, the hosting account, all in your name, not mine.

Most clients do stay on a care plan afterwards, and here's why it earns its keep: search doesn't sit still. What gets rewarded shifts year to year, and the practices nearby who put something useful up every month quietly climb past the ones who haven't touched their site since launch. A care plan is content and blog updates, keeping your local search presence current, and someone actually watching the numbers.

But if you'd rather take it and run it yourself, that's a completely reasonable choice — I'll hand everything over properly and won't make it awkward.