This is the first question almost every owner asks me, and most websites dodge it. I won't quote a number here without seeing your business, because anyone who does is either guessing or selling you a template with your logo dropped in. What I can do is show you exactly what a quote is made of, so when you get one — from me or anyone else — you can read it.
What you are actually paying for
A custom website is not a product sitting on a shelf. It is design time, build time, and content work. The price follows those three things and almost nothing else. A five-page site for a remodeler with photos already on a hard drive is a different job than a real estate site pulling live listings, and the quote should say so in plain language.
- Design: how many unique page layouts have to be drawn from scratch.
- Build: forms, booking, galleries, listing feeds, anything that has to work rather than just sit there.
- Content: whether you hand over photos and text, or someone has to shape them first.
- Setup: domain, hosting, search setup, analytics, and the walkthrough at the end.
Why Central Florida quotes vary so much
Around Wildwood, The Villages, Leesburg, and Ocala you will see three very different kinds of offers. There is the cheap monthly template — low upfront, locked in forever, and you never own it. There is the agency proposal with a project manager, a strategist, and a junior designer who does the actual work. And there is someone like me: one person who designs and builds it, so you are paying for the work and not the layers around it.
The gap between those three is not quality of pixels. It is ownership, attention, and who picks up the phone when something breaks eight months later.
The questions that change the number
Before I can price anything, I need to know how many pages you really need, whether customers should be able to book or just call, whether you have photos worth using, and whether anything has to connect to another system. Most local service businesses need less than they think. A clear five-page site that loads fast and makes the phone number obvious beats a twenty-page site nobody finishes reading.
How to tell a fair quote from a bad one
- It says who owns the domain, the files, and the accounts. The answer should be you.
- It lists what happens after launch, including what you pay if you want nothing.
- It names a real timeline instead of “as soon as possible.”
- It does not lock you into a monthly fee to keep your own site online.
If a quote is vague on any of those, that is not a pricing problem, it is a trust problem. Ask the question directly and see how fast the answer comes back.
What I do
I quote one number for the whole build after a short call, and I do not start until you know what it covers. You can see the kind of work that number buys on the work page — every site there is live and running for a real local business.
Written by Max Brown, who designs and builds every site. See the work or talk to me directly.