The questions I get asked

With me, it starts at nothing: the Studio is free, you build the site yourself and you leave with your actual code. If you want me to take over, we talk it through for fifteen minutes, and you get an itemized, fixed-price quote before anything starts.

Elsewhere, it mostly depends on what you ask for. Two costs always come back, no matter who builds: the domain name ($15 to $30 a year) and hosting (from free to a few hundred dollars a year). Those are small. Be wary when someone inflates them.

The bulk of the price is the design work. And the real question is never "how much," it’s: what do you actually need this year?

Do the math. Over five years, $59 a month is $3,540. For a site you don’t own, can’t take with you, and that often looks like 400 other businesses' sites because it’s the same template.

The day you stop paying, it all disappears. Your text, your photos, the search ranking you built up. You start from zero.

A subscription for real maintenance, someone who watches, updates, and answers when things break, is a service with real value. A disguised rent that keeps you captive is not.

That’s the only question that matters when you buy a website, and you should ask it of anyone, me included.

With me the answer is short: everything. The domain has been registered in your name from day one, the code is yours, the content is yours. No exit fees, no discussion, no clause to re-read.

If someone else answers "nothing," you’re not buying a site. You’re renting one.

Go check. Today. It’s the highest-return thing you can do in ten minutes.

Your domain is your address, your identity, the most valuable thing you own online. It should be registered in your name, in an account you can access. I’ve seen contracts where it was in the agency’s name. That isn’t illegal, but it is deeply dishonest.

• Is the domain in my name, with my email as the contact?
• Do I have access to the registrar account?
• Do I know when it expires?

If you can’t answer all three, that’s where you start.

The perfect site doesn’t exist, and a site is never finished. The one you put online in two years will be edited the following month anyway.

While you wait, the people looking for you don’t find you. They call someone else. That delay has a real cost, it’s just invisible because nobody invoices you for the calls you didn’t get.

The best site is the one that exists. Ship one clean page this week, then grow it with your business.

Your Facebook page isn’t yours. You’re renting space from someone else who decides who sees your posts, changes the rules when they feel like it, and can suspend your account without explaining why.

Google doesn’t crawl Facebook the way it crawls your site. Someone searching for your service in your town is far less likely to land on your page than on a real website.

Keep the page. It’s useful. But point it at somewhere that belongs to you.

For a lot of businesses, one well-built page beats ten weak ones, every time.

When someone lands on your site they have one question: can these people solve my problem? A single page answers it on the way down, like a conversation. Here’s what I do, for whom, how it works, the proof, the price, how to reach me. Zero clicks required.

An underrated benefit: one page, you can actually keep it current. Ten pages, you’ll neglect seven.

It stops being enough when you want to rank for several distinct services, when you serve several towns, or when you start writing. Going from one page to several is easy: the content already exists, you just spread it out.

All three are good answers, depending on where you are.

• A builder is the fastest way to start. You’re online this week, with no technical knowledge. That’s what CJFG Studio does, for free.
• WordPress is the Swiss army knife. Very flexible, endless plugins, but it needs upkeep and real vigilance on security.
• Custom is cut to your goals. Faster, longer-lasting, and more expensive up front. It’s justified when your site genuinely does work for your business.

My advice after fifteen years: start with the simplest thing that solves this year’s problem. You can always change paths, and that’s far less trouble than guessing in advance.

Yes, and you should demand it of any vendor.

Changing a price, adding a photo, fixing your hours, posting an update: none of that should ever mean waiting on someone, or paying for an hour of work.

Depending on your "web guy" to change a phone number isn’t normal. Independent doesn’t mean alone: it means you decide when you delegate.

Because a number on a page means nothing until you know what is inside it. Two businesses ask me for a website: one needs a single page, the other a bilingual shop with online booking. One posted number would have lied to both.

What I give you instead beats a number: you can build your entire site in the Studio, free, no account and no credit card. You see the result before you owe me a cent.

And when we do talk, you get an itemized, fixed-price quote. No “starting at,” no surprise at the end, and no sales conversation you don’t know how to leave.

No.

There are people at $40 an hour. There are also agencies at $200. I sit where I think the value is honest for both sides.

What I can guarantee is that you can leave whenever you want, with your things. That part has no price.

With the Studio, an evening or two. Genuinely. You can be online this week.

For a project with me it depends on the scope, but I give you a number of weeks before we start, not after. Custom work is quoted up front: you know what we’re building and how many hours.

What delays projects most is almost never the code. It’s the text and the photos. We can plan for that from the start so it doesn’t drag.

More than ever, in fact. An AI doesn’t invent you: it cites sources. If you exist nowhere, it can’t talk about you.

What changes is how people find you. Before, someone typed three words into Google and scanned ten links. Now they ask the whole question and get an answer. To be in that answer you need clear pages that genuinely answer the question, and a credible business the machine can understand.

Good news: what works for AI is roughly what already worked for Google. Be clear, be specific, be truthful.

I use it as a tool, never as the author, and never without telling you.

AI text left as-is is recognizable from a hundred feet: everything is smooth, everything is balanced, nobody actually talks that way. Worse, it could be any competitor’s copy. Your real voice is precisely the thing nobody can copy.

How I work: I start from your own words, often recorded while we talk, and the tool structures rather than invents. Everything that comes out is re-read, cut, and put back in your voice.

If you collect information about people, even just a name and an email in a contact form, yes.

In practice, for a small business it comes down to a few habits: only ask for what you need, say what it’s for, don’t keep it longer than necessary, protect your access, and publish a privacy policy in plain language.

I’m not a lawyer and this isn’t legal advice. But the short version is that common sense already gets you 90% of the way.