Website Design & Development

Updated September 2026 · Written and maintained by the Progression Agency strategy team

We build websites that produce inquiries, and we publish the standard we build them to so you can hold us to it. Nine stages, fourteen technical commitments, a redirect map before development starts, an open CMS you can take anywhere, and a scope document that says what is excluded as well as what is included. Prices are below. So is the honest advice about when you should repair rather than rebuild — which is more often than agencies admit.

What a website has to do

Strip away everything else and a business website does four jobs. It has to be found. It has to be understood by a stranger in about four seconds. It has to be usable on a phone, on a bad connection, by somebody in a hurry. And it has to make contacting you effortless. A site that does all four while looking ordinary outperforms a beautiful one that does three.

That is the standard we design to, and every number above is measurable rather than asserted. If a build misses any of them it is not finished, however good it looks in a portfolio.

Our process

Nine stages. The first and the eighth are the ones most agencies skip, and they are the two that determine whether the site can rank at all and whether you keep the rankings you already have.

Stage one: discovery

Before anybody opens a design tool we need your revenue by service line, your margin, your close rate on inbound inquiries, your capacity and your seasonality. Without those the site gets optimized toward whatever is easiest to generate rather than toward what is worth having, and every subsequent decision is a guess dressed as a preference.

Stage two: architecture

The sitemap, derived from what people actually search rather than from how your business is organized internally. One page per intent, mapped before anything is designed. This is the stage that decides whether the site can ever rank, and it is invisible in every portfolio you will ever look at.

Stage three: the content plan

What each page must contain, who writes it, who approves it, and by when. The single largest cause of website projects running late lives here, and it is almost always client-side — a draft waiting for a review nobody has time for. We agree the dates up front and we chase them.

Stage four: design

Unique templates rather than unique pages. A type scale, a color system, spacing rules, component states, and responsive behavior tested at four breakpoints. When you compare quotes, count templates rather than pages — a twelve-page site built from three templates is a completely different job from one needing nine.

Stage five: build

Semantic HTML with a logical heading order. An open-source CMS you can host anywhere. Structured data implemented per template rather than bolted onto the homepage. A performance budget agreed at the start and enforced, rather than a performance audit at the end.

Stage six: content production

Written, edited and photographed. The pages that rank contain something the pages already ranking do not — a number you measured, a process you actually follow, a constraint only somebody in your business would know. That requires interviewing your people, so we book that time in advance.

Stage seven: QA

Accessibility against WCAG 2.2 AA. Performance measured on a throttled mobile connection rather than on office fibre. Every form submitted from a real phone with the email confirmed received. Structured data validated per template. Browser and device matrix checked.

Stage eight: redirect mapping

Every existing indexed URL mapped to a specific new URL, implemented as a 301 and tested on staging before launch day. This document is produced before development starts, not before launch, because producing it early forces somebody to look at which pages actually earn traffic before deciding to delete them.

Stage nine: launch and verification

Within the hour of going live: sitemap submitted, Search Console verified, the site crawled for 404s and redirect chains, forms tested again, the staging noindex tag confirmed removed, and the top fifty URLs checked by hand. Then again the next morning.

What you get

Every row above appears in the scope document rather than in a sales conversation. Take the list to any other proposal you have received and compare — the differences are usually more informative than the prices.

What it costs

Hosting and maintenance are separate and optional — you are welcome to host anywhere, and we will help you set it up either way. The full market context is on how much does a website cost and our wider rates are on marketing agency pricing.

Where the money actually goes

Buyers consistently expect design to be nearly half the budget. On a build that performs it is closer to a fifth, with discovery, content and QA taking a third between them. That gap is where most disappointing website projects are decided, and it is worth understanding before you compare two quotes on price alone.

When you should not rebuild

We publish this knowing it costs us projects. Rebuilding a site that already converts is the most expensive mistake in this category — it costs several times what a restyle costs and it risks rankings that a restyle does not touch. If your site is fast, indexed, converting and merely dated, we will tell you to restyle it.

Restyle in place

New typography, new color system, new imagery, updated components — applied to your existing structure and URLs. Three to five weeks, a fraction of the cost, and nothing that currently works is at risk. This is the right answer more often than the industry admits.

Repair rather than replace

If the problems are a broken form, missing service pages, no internal links and slow images, those are fixable in a fortnight on the site you have. We will quote that instead, and we will tell you what it will and will not solve.

Instrument before you decide

If there is no analytics and no Search Console, nobody — including us — can tell you whether the site is your constraint. Install measurement, wait a month, and decide with data. That advice costs you nothing and it is the correct first step surprisingly often.

Conversion: the part that decides whether any of it was worth it

Traffic is a multiplier applied to a conversion rate. A site converting at 0.8% against a 3% benchmark discards three quarters of everything every channel delivers, and fixing that is cheaper and faster than tripling traffic. Nine of the ten fixes above can be done on the site you already have.

The four-second test

Show your homepage to somebody who has never seen it, for four seconds, then take it away and ask what the business does, where it operates and what they should do next. If they cannot answer all three, no amount of traffic will help. It costs nothing and it is the most useful user research most businesses will ever do.

Forms

Every additional field costs completions. Name, phone and one free-text box outperforms a nine-field qualification form for first contact — you can qualify on the call. Fields large enough to tap accurately, no CAPTCHA that fails on a slow connection, and the whole thing tested from a real phone before launch and monthly afterwards.

Trust signals

License number, insurance, years in business, review count with a real rating, association memberships, and photographs of actual work. Stock photography of a smiling model actively reduces credibility with buyers who have seen every image in the catalog.

Price transparency

‘Starting at’ outperforms ‘call for pricing’ on every metric we measure, and it pre-qualifies inquiries so you spend less time on people who were never going to buy. If you genuinely cannot publish a number, publish the variables that move it.

Response-time promises

A stated commitment you can actually keep — ‘we answer every call within sixty seconds during business hours’ — is a differentiator worth more than a redesign. Responding to an inquiry within five minutes rather than an hour roughly doubles the contact rate in our own client data.

The technical standard

Fourteen items, all measurable, all written into the scope. Ask any other agency which of these they will commit to in writing — the answer separates a build from a template application faster than any portfolio review.

Performance

A performance budget agreed at the start and enforced through the build, rather than an audit at the end that produces a list of regrets. Images as WebP or AVIF at the dimensions actually displayed, explicit width and height on everything, third-party scripts audited before launch, and the LCP element never lazy-loaded.

Accessibility

WCAG 2.2 level AA: meaningful alternative text, 4.5:1 contrast on body text, everything keyboard operable, visible focus states, real form labels, errors announced to assistive technology, logical heading order, and usability at 200% zoom. In the United States this is increasingly a legal exposure rather than a nicety, and it is dramatically cheaper built in than retrofitted.

Structured data

Implemented per template rather than pasted onto the homepage: Organization and LocalBusiness sitewide, Service on service pages, BreadcrumbList everywhere, FAQPage where there are genuine questions, Article on editorial content, Person on author pages. Validated per template before launch.

Security and maintenance

HTTPS enforced with no mixed content, the CMS and plugins current, backups running with a restore actually tested, and Search Console alerts configured. A hacked site loses rankings and takes weeks to recover, and it is entirely preventable.

Migration: keeping the traffic you already have

If your current site has any search visibility, the redirect map is the most important deliverable in the entire project and it is the one most frequently absent. Losing a year of accumulated ranking on launch day is entirely preventable and it happens constantly, because the damage appears over four to eight weeks — long after anybody associates it with the launch.

What we export

• Every URL in the Search Console Pages report, indexed and excluded
• Every URL in the current XML sitemap
• Every URL a full crawl of the live site discovers
• Every landing page from twelve months of analytics, ranked by sessions
• Every URL with an external backlink pointing at it

What we do not do

• Redirect everything to the homepage — Google treats that as a soft 404 and the signal is lost
• Change URLs without a reason
• Redesign the substance of pages that are already ranking
• Launch on a Friday
• Delete the old site before the new one is verified

What happens afterwards

Two to six weeks of ranking volatility is normal even on a clean migration. We watch the Search Console Pages report daily for the first month, because rising 404s and new ‘Duplicate’ statuses are the earliest warning. A dip that has not recovered by week eight is a problem rather than patience, and we treat it as one.

Platforms we build on

WordPress

Our default for most business sites. Fully portable, extensible, and you can host it anywhere. It requires maintenance — core and plugin updates, security monitoring, backups — which is a real ongoing cost and the reason we quote it separately rather than hiding it.

Headless (Next.js with a content API)

For performance-critical sites, complex content models, or businesses with a development capability. Fastest and most flexible, and it needs somebody technical available. We recommend it when it is right and say so when it is not.

Shopify

For ecommerce, unless there is a specific reason not to. Well-supported, well-understood, and the transaction infrastructure is somebody else’s problem — which is worth a great deal.

Squarespace and Webflow

Both perfectly capable for smaller sites, and we will build on either if it fits. Squarespace is the right answer for a business that wants twelve pages it maintains itself with predictable costs. Webflow when design control matters more than extensibility.

What we will not build on

Any proprietary platform the agency owns. If leaving requires a rebuild, that is not a website — it is a subscription with a design attached, and the eventual cost is payable to whoever you move to.

How long it takes

Six to ten weeks for a brochure site where content is ready. Twelve to twenty if it has to be written. Add three to five weeks for a second language done properly. Overruns are almost always caused by content and approvals rather than by development, which is why we agree content dates in stage three and chase them.

What you can do to make it faster

1. Name one decision-maker with the authority to approve without a committee.
2. Gather your content, or agree at the start that we write it.
3. Book the photography in week one — it takes weeks to arrange and it is worth more than most design premiums.
4. Provide access on day one: registrar, DNS, hosting, current CMS, analytics, Search Console.
5. Block four to eight hours a month for approvals, interviews and decisions.
6. Tell us what you will not do, before somebody plans around it.

What is in the contract

What we build for different businesses

Local service businesses

A page per service, a page per area you genuinely serve, problem-diagnosis content, a price list or service list as indexed HTML, and a conversion path that assumes the visitor is on a phone in a driveway. Trust signals above the fold, license numbers visible, and a form that works.

Professional services

Practice-area pages with genuine depth, individual professional pages with verifiable credentials — which rank strongly for name searches and convert far above average — and procedural content answering the questions nobody else answers. Compliance review where the profession requires it.

Healthcare and dental

Procedure pages written to answer patient anxiety rather than to describe technique, insurance acceptance pages, provider bios, and a tracking configuration that respects HIPAA constraints on pages containing protected health information.

Restaurants and hospitality

The menu as real indexed HTML rather than a PDF — this alone unlocks search demand for specific dishes combined with a neighborhood name — plus hours that are actually correct, a phone number that dials in one tap, real photographs of the actual food, and a deliberate decision about third-party ordering.

Ecommerce

Category pages as the money pages with real buying guidance below the grid, unique product descriptions rather than manufacturer copy, faceted navigation handled deliberately so it does not generate forty thousand crawlable variants, and product schema kept in sync.

B2B and industrial

Capability pages with genuine specification detail, certifications, tolerances, materials and lead times. B2B buyers search extremely specific technical language that consumer-oriented sites never use, and the competition for those terms is frequently negligible.

Nonprofits

Program and eligibility pages, application processes, event listings with proper structured data, and content in every language the community actually speaks. Also help claiming Google Ad Grants, which provides substantial free search advertising and is widely unclaimed.

Responsive design, tested properly

Not ‘it works on mobile’ — tested at four breakpoints on real devices, on a throttled connection, with the things people actually do. Tap targets large enough to hit accurately. No horizontal scrolling anywhere. Tables that scroll inside their own container rather than pushing the page sideways. Text readable without pinching. An address that opens the map app in one tap.

Information architecture

The sitemap is a commercial document, not an organizational chart. It is derived from what people search and what they need to decide, which is frequently not how the business thinks about itself. One page per intent, three clicks maximum from the homepage to any commercial page, and breadcrumbs with markup on every page.

Copywriting

Written by somebody who interviewed you, not assembled from the pages already ranking. The pages that win contain information nobody else has: what a job actually involves, what it costs, what goes wrong, what you do differently and why. That requires access to your people, which is why we book it in advance rather than hoping for it.

Photography and imagery

Real photographs of your work, your premises and your people. We art-direct and we can arrange the shoot. Budget $1,200 to $4,000 for a day plus retouching and usage rights, and expect it to outperform an equivalent spend on design. Shoot vertically as well as horizontally, because most of your audience is holding a phone.

Forms and lead capture

Three fields, real labels, errors announced to assistive technology, spam handled without a CAPTCHA that fails on a slow connection, and delivery confirmed by email and stored in a database so a mail failure does not silently lose inquiries. Tested from a real phone before launch and monthly afterwards.

Analytics and conversion tracking

Google Analytics 4 configured with conversion events that correspond to real business events rather than page views. Call tracking with a duration threshold. Deduplication so one person who calls and submits does not count twice. Search Console verified. Where a CRM exists, connected, so reporting can show revenue rather than leads.

Structured data and AI visibility

Schema per template, question-shaped headings with the answer within sixty words underneath, comparative information in real HTML tables, specific committed numbers rather than ‘competitive pricing’, a visible last-updated date in the body, an llms.txt file at the root, and AI crawlers deliberately allowed in robots.txt unless you decide otherwise. Covered further in GEO vs SEO.

Multilingual builds

Separate URLs per language with correct hreflang annotations, native-quality writing across the whole conversion path rather than a translated homepage leading to English service pages, and somebody who can answer the phone in that language. Roughly a fifty per cent premium over a single-language build, and in the right market it is the highest-return line item in the quote.

Ecommerce specifics

Category pages treated as the primary landing pages, faceted navigation canonicalised or blocked before it generates tens of thousands of crawlable variants, unique product content rather than manufacturer copy, product schema with accurate price and availability, and out-of-stock handling that keeps the URL and offers alternatives rather than 404ing a page with links and rankings.

Booking and scheduling

If your business books appointments, integrated booking removes the largest single point of friction between interest and commitment. We prefer an integration you control over a third party that owns the customer relationship, and we test it on a phone before launch because that is where it will be used.

Integrations

CRM, payment, booking, inventory, membership, ERP. Each is a project inside the project and each is where fixed-price quotes go wrong, because integrations behave differently from their documentation. We name them individually in the scope with an allowance against each rather than absorbing them into a single number.

Hosting

In your name, at a provider you can log into. We will recommend one and set it up, and you can move whenever you like. Server response time floors every other performance metric, so this is not the place to economize — the $300 a year saved on cheap shared hosting is spent several times over on developer callouts and lost inquiries.

Maintenance

Core and plugin updates, security monitoring, backups with a restore actually tested, uptime monitoring, and a small allowance of content edits. $50 to $250 a month for a small site. Optional, and you can do it yourself or use anybody — we will document what needs doing either way. More detail on website maintenance.

Training and handover

Recorded, so it survives the person who attended leaving. Written documentation of where everything lives, which accounts control what, and how to do the six things you will actually need to do. Plus a written offboarding process agreed at the start, in case you ever want to work with somebody else.

Ownership

You own the domain, the hosting, the CMS, the content, the design files and the source. All of it transfers on final payment and none of it is contingent on continuing to work with us. This is the clause that traps more businesses than any other and it is free to get right at the start.

What we will tell you not to do

1. Rebuild a site that already converts and merely looks dated.
2. Publish your menu, price list or service list as a PDF.
3. Build on a platform you cannot take with you.
4. Launch without a redirect map.
5. Spend on design before fixing a form that does not work.
6. Add a chat widget that costs you a second of load time for a handful of conversations.
7. Buy stock photography when your own work photographs better.
8. Build forty pages before validating that four of them index.
9. Pay for a rebuild when instrumenting the current site would answer the question for free.

How we quote

After a conversation about what the site must produce, never before. We will ask for your close rate, your average customer value and your capacity, because without those we cannot tell whether the project makes sense for you — and if it does not, we would rather say so in the first meeting than in month four.

How we work with your existing agency

Frequently and without friction. If you have an SEO or paid media agency you are happy with, we build to their specification and hand over cleanly. We will ask them for the keyword map, the redirect requirements and the tracking spec before we design anything, which is the sequence that avoids the usual argument three weeks after launch.

What happens after launch

Thirty days of support included, because launch week is when things surface. Indexing confirmed, Core Web Vitals measured from field data rather than a lab score, forms re-tested, the Pages report watched daily for the first month, and a check-in at week eight to confirm any migration volatility has resolved.

Who we work with

Businesses that want a site that produces inquiries rather than one that wins awards, and that are prepared to give four to eight hours a month to approvals and interviews during the build. We are a poor fit for organizations that need design by committee, and we will say so early rather than discovering it in month three.

Who we are not right for

1. If you want the cheapest possible site, a template you set up yourself will genuinely serve you better.
2. If you need a rebuild in three weeks, we cannot do it properly in three weeks and we will not pretend to.
3. If approval requires six people to agree, the project will cost more and take longer than either of us wants.
4. If you are not prepared to be interviewed, the content will be generic and it will not rank.
5. If your constraint is capacity rather than demand, more inquiries are not a benefit and you should spend the money elsewhere.

Frequently misunderstood things about web design

A redesign does not improve rankings by itself

Unless search was designed into it. The same thin content, the same missing internal links and no keyword-led architecture will rank the same or worse, and a launch without a redirect map will rank substantially worse. Design is close to neutral; structure and content are not.

Word count is not the goal, coverage is

Longer pages correlate with better rankings because thorough pages answer more of what a searcher needs. Adding words without adding coverage produces a longer page that ranks the same. List the questions a visitor has, answer them all, and count the words afterwards as a diagnostic.

Templates are not bad for SEO

Templates are neutral. What harms performance is the absence of a keyword-led architecture, thin service pages, no internal linking and a broken migration — all of which happen just as easily on a custom build.

Nobody reads your homepage

Most visitors arrive on an interior page from a search result. The homepage matters for brand searches and for orientation; the pages that produce inquiries are almost always service and location pages. Budget accordingly.

Fast is a specification, not an adjective

‘Optimized for speed’ means nothing. Mobile LCP under 2.5 seconds on field data means something, and it can be measured by anybody, which is why we put it in the contract.

Browser and device support matrix

Named in the contract, so nobody argues about it after launch. We test against the current and previous major version of each, on real devices rather than in an emulator.

What is included at each price point

The differences between tiers are structural rather than cosmetic — every tier gets the same technical standard, the same ownership terms and the same accessibility commitment. What changes is scope.

Note the rows that are identical across every tier. The technical standard, the accessibility commitment, the performance targets and the ownership terms do not vary with price, because they are not features — they are the minimum conditions for the thing to work.

Watch: build quality and search

Three from Google Search Central that bear directly on the material above.

Every guide we publish, grouped by what you are trying to do.

The nine stages, as cards

Answer first: the sequence below is the order the work has to happen in, because each stage consumes the output of the one before it. Skipping ahead to design is the single most common cause of a project that overruns and then underperforms.

The launch-day checks that actually catch problems

Answer first: six checks, run within the hour of launch, catch nearly every launch failure we have seen. The fourth — removing the staging noindex — is the one that most often goes unnoticed for weeks and costs the most.

What you should own at the end

Answer first: everything. Domain, hosting, CMS admin, analytics, design files and code, all in your business’s name with the agency holding access rather than ownership. This costs nothing to arrange at the start and is expensive to unwind later.

Every row in the right-hand column is something we have seen happen. None of it is malicious in most cases; it is what results from nobody asking the question at the start.

What we cut from most briefs

Answer first: the six items below appear in a majority of briefs, cost real load time, and produce close to nothing. Removing them is usually the cheapest performance improvement available on a redesign.

Repair or rebuild?

Answer first: repair when the site is indexed, ranking and structurally sound but looks dated. Rebuild when the URL structure, the CMS or the editability is the problem. A restyle costs a fraction of a rebuild and carries none of the ranking risk.

Read the middle two columns together: only three of the seven rows point unambiguously at a rebuild, and two of those are about maintenance rather than appearance. We would rather quote a restyle for the right work than a rebuild for the wrong work.

Questions to ask any web design supplier

Answer first: six questions, and the one that reveals most is what the scope excludes. Any supplier can list what is included; only one with a real process can tell you what is not.

Web design for general contractors

Construction and trades sites fail in a consistent and fixable way, which is worth setting out separately because the buyer behaves differently from a typical service client.

What general contractor web design has to get right

A general contractor web design has three jobs: prove the work with real project photography, make the service area unambiguous, and put the phone number where a thumb finds it. Homeowners comparing contractors decide on evidence and reachability, and most trade sites lead with a stock photo and bury the number in a footer.

Why the standard template underperforms

Web design for general contractors is frequently sold as a template with a gallery bolted on. The gallery is the site — before-and-after sequences from jobs you actually did, with the town named — and treating it as a subpage rather than the main event is the single most common structural error in the category.

License, insurance and service area

These are not fine print for this buyer. Stating the license number, the insurance position and the exact towns served removes the three questions that otherwise become a phone call, and their absence reads as evasion whether or not it is.

Frequently asked questions