Questions, answered plainly

I do. There is no team behind the name and nothing is passed to a subcontractor without telling you. The person you brief is the person who designs it, builds it and answers the phone afterwards.

Vancouver, British Columbia. It matters mostly for time zone. Being reachable during your working day is worth more than being in the same city, and most of the work is remote regardless.

Yes, though the overlap in working hours becomes the deciding factor. If a five hour difference is workable for you, it is workable for me.

A call, usually thirty minutes, about what you are trying to achieve rather than what you want built. You get a written scope and a fixed price from that before any work begins.

Time in the first week, mainly. Decisions, access, content and honest answers about what has and has not worked before. After that the demands on you drop considerably.

I will say so, and where possible point you somewhere better. Taking on work I am not the right person for costs you money and costs me a reference.

It depends on scope, and the number is agreed before work starts rather than discovered along the way. What drives it is the number of pages, how much custom functionality is involved, and whether content and photography already exist.

Fixed price for defined projects, because it puts the risk of an estimate being wrong on me rather than you. Hourly only for open-ended work where a fixed scope would be dishonest.

Yes, typically split across the project with the balance on completion. The exact terms are in the written scope.

Whatever the scope does not name. Stock photography, paid plugin licences, ad spend and third-party subscriptions are usually yours directly, so you own them and can leave.

You get a price for the change before it happens. Nothing appears on an invoice that you did not agree to first.

No. Project work ends when the project ends. Ongoing support exists where it is genuinely useful, and you can stop it.

A focused marketing site is usually four to six weeks. Larger builds run longer. You get a written timeline with the quote, and if it slips you hear it from me before you notice.

WordPress when your team needs to edit content regularly. Next.js when the site is mostly static and speed is the priority. The choice follows from who maintains it, not from preference.

No. Themes and page builders sometimes, where they genuinely serve the client, but the design is yours rather than a purchased layout with your logo on it.

Yes, and that is designed for rather than tolerated. You get a small number of clearly labelled editable regions and documentation written for a person, not a developer.

Enough to get it right. Revisions are part of the process rather than a metered commodity, which is possible because scope is fixed up front.

You do. Code, content, domain and hosting accounts are all in your name. There is no arrangement where leaving means losing the site.

You know your business better than any writer. The usual arrangement is that you supply the substance and it gets shaped into pages that read well and target the right searches.

No, and anyone who does is either guessing or lying. What can be committed to is the work: the technical fixes, the content, the structure and honest measurement of what it produces.

Local search can move within weeks. Competitive organic terms are usually three to six months before the trend is clear. Anyone promising faster is describing luck.

The foundations are: correct titles and descriptions, structured data, clean architecture, fast pages, analytics and Search Console configured at launch. Ongoing content and link work is separate.

Ads if you need enquiries this month and the arithmetic works. SEO if you can wait and want the traffic to keep arriving after you stop paying. Often both, with ads telling you which terms are worth pursuing organically.

You get told, with the numbers behind it. Some categories have click costs that cannot work against the margin, and running an unprofitable channel to keep a retainer is not a service.

Not the kind you buy. Links that come from real coverage, directories that matter in your sector and genuine relationships hold their value; purchased links are a risk on your domain, not mine.

Usually yes, often within a day. The important part is establishing how it happened, because cleaning the infection without closing the entry point is why sites get reinfected within weeks.

The goal is no legitimate content lost. Anything removed is preserved so it can be reviewed and restored if it turns out to have been yours.

On most WordPress sites it is images and plugin bloat rather than hosting. That is diagnosable in an afternoon and usually fixable without a rebuild.

You need updates applied, backups verified and someone watching. Whether that is a plan with me or a process you run yourself is your call, and I will tell you honestly which makes sense at your size.

Only if someone has restored one. A backup nobody has tested is an assumption, and testing it takes an hour.

Response times are agreed in writing before you need them, so you know what to expect rather than finding out during an outage.

Staging review, cross-device QA, redirects from old URLs, schema, Search Console, backups and a rollback plan. Launch day should be uneventful, and that is the result of the preparation rather than luck.

They can, and the usual cause is missing redirects from old URLs. Mapping those before launch is what prevents it, and it is the step most often skipped.

No. There is a settling period after launch where small things surface, and those are part of the project rather than a new one.

Yes, and it is common. It starts with reading what is there, because the honest recommendation is sometimes to fix rather than replace.

Everything is in your name and documented, so you can. A site you cannot leave is a site built to trap you, and that is not how this works.