Paste your website address. We can pick up services, hours and contact details, though some sites give us very little. You check the suggestions and add your prices, photos and business story.
Reading your site is free and leaves it unchanged.
A new website costs $40 a month or $400 a year. Your preview is ready within 48 hours of receiving your completed questionnaire and payment.
Check these suggestions in the questionnaire. You can also add your prices, work photos and what you’d like us to say about your business.
Your current site stays online while we build its replacement. You review the new site on a private link and approve it before launch.
To launch, you point your domain at us: two nameserver lines, which we send you, pasted into the account you already have at your registrar — nobody hands over a password, and you keep the company that registers your domain. From then on we hold the domain’s DNS and make the change that puts the new site on it. If you would rather keep DNS where it is, we send you the records to add instead. Transferring the registration to another company is a separate, optional step.
Keep your old hosting active until the switch is complete. If it also provides your email, keep the email service active too. Your mailbox itself is never touched: before the switch we read the email records your domain has now and copy them across, so mail keeps arriving at the same address on the same service.
Your domain and content remain yours. Ask and we’ll send your words, photos and logo within seven days, as our terms explain.
Buying the website files costs $499 less your plan credit. Monthly customers get this month’s $40 deducted. For annual customers, we deduct the part of your $400 payment covering this month and the months ahead. After a buyout, your website plan ends at the end of the current billing month. See what the buyout includes.
This is the part worth reading slowly, because it is the reason most people stay on a site they do not like. Your old pages have addresses — yoursite.com/roof-repair — and some of them are why the phone rings. Move without a plan for those addresses and every one of them becomes an error page.
So before we build, we read your site and list the pages we can see. You correct that list, because a front page rarely links everything. Then every old address is pointed at the page that replaces it: a permanent redirect, the kind search engines understand as “this moved here” rather than “this is gone.” Somebody who finds your old repair page in Google next year lands on your repair page.
Two honest limits. The biggest thing you give up: the build is five pages. If you have twelve, seven of them do not come across as pages. Where an old page has no replacement, we tell you which ones and you decide where each should land; we will not quietly send someone asking about gutters to a page about roofs, because a wrong destination is worse than an error. And nobody can promise you rankings, us included. What we can promise is that the addresses keep working for as long as the site is up, which means for as long as you are with us, or from the day you buy the site outright and host it yourself, redirects and all. Cancel without buying and the site comes down, and the old addresses go with it. That is the honest shape of it, and it is on the pricing page too.
The switchover itself is a DNS change on your own domain, made when you say go, after you have seen the finished site. Your old site stays up until that moment.
You can keep most of what you already have. Here it is, item by item:
One reason, and it isn’t the design: on a builder, every future change is yours to make. New hours in March, a price rise, the photo from last week. Each one is you, at a laptop, at ten at night. Here it’s a message from your account, and five edit requests a month are included, and everything in one message counts as one. A builder charges $16 to $50 a month for the software and hands you that job; the $40 here pays for the software and the person doing it. If you enjoy building websites, stay where you are. You’ll miss the control. The comparisons say where each of them beats us.