Websites Built to Book Work, Not Win Awards
Your website is the only employee working at 11pm on a Sunday. It should be closing, not decorating.
Web design at Pufferfish Media means a website that loads in under two seconds, says plainly what the business does, and is built to make the phone ring rather than to decorate. Search structure and schema are part of the build. Projects are quoted as a fixed number starting at $3,500.
What's included
- Custom design system built for your brand, no purchased themes
- Up to 10 pages including service pages and location pages
- Wireframes and Figma mockups approved before any code is written
- Mobile-first build targeting sub-two-second loads and green Core Web Vitals
- On-page SEO and schema built in at the template level
- Lead forms, click-to-call, quote flows and CRM integration
- Ecommerce builds on Shopify or WooCommerce with payments, shipping and feeds configured
- Full redirect map and metadata migration on any redesign
- Optional maintenance: hosting, security, backups, edits and a monthly health report
Design decisions that survive contact with a customer
A homeowner on the Eastern Shore lands on your site from a phone, on cellular, standing in a driveway, and gives you about four seconds. In that window they need to know what you do, whether you cover their town, whether other people trust you, and how to reach you. Everything else on the page is competing with those four things. We design around that sequence: a headline that names the service and the service area, proof close to the top, a phone number that is tappable everywhere, and a form short enough that finishing it is not a decision.
That is why we start with the money pages rather than the homepage. Individual service pages and location pages are what search sends traffic to and what ads point at. Once those are right, the homepage becomes a routing layer instead of the place where everything is crammed.
The build: right tool, honestly chosen
Most marketing sites we build are modern React applications, statically rendered and deployed to a CDN. They load fast, cost almost nothing to host, and have no plugin surface for anyone to attack. For projects that need an application rather than a website, dashboards, client portals, booking systems or internal tools, we build on Lovable with a real database, authentication and role-based access, which shortens timelines substantially compared with building the same thing from scratch.
WordPress is not banned here. If your team publishes several times a week and lives in the editor, WordPress is a reasonable answer, and we build it properly: a custom theme, no page builder, a short and deliberate plugin list, and caching configured before launch. What we will not do is ship an Elementor site with forty plugins and call it fast. Ecommerce goes to Shopify by default, or WooCommerce when the catalogue and the existing stack genuinely call for it, with payments, tax, shipping, inventory, Google Shopping feeds and email platform integration configured as part of the build rather than left as homework.
Redesigns without losing what you already earned
The fastest way to destroy a business online is a redesign launched without a redirect map. Every URL on the current site gets inventoried, matched to a destination, and redirected with a 301 before launch. Metadata migrates, schema is rebuilt, analytics and conversion tracking are reconfigured, and rankings are watched daily for the first month. If a page loses position, we know within days rather than discovering it in a quarterly report.
Signs it is time: mobile loads take more than three seconds, the design predates your current positioning, your conversion rate sits under two percent on decent traffic, or you cannot change a headline without calling a developer. Any one of those is costing more per month than the rebuild costs once.
Landing pages, accessibility and the details
Campaign traffic gets its own pages. Sending paid clicks to a homepage wastes them, while a single-purpose page matched to the ad message typically converts several times better and improves Quality Score at the same time, which lowers what you pay per click. We build those with one goal, one call to action, a variant ready for testing, and heatmap and scroll tracking installed from day one.
Accessibility is handled during design rather than bolted on: contrast that passes, focus states that are visible, labelled form fields, alt text, and keyboard navigation that works. It is the right thing to do, it reduces legal exposure, and it happens to correlate with the same structure search engines and screen readers both prefer.
You own everything at the end. Design files, code, domain, hosting account, analytics property. Builds run three to six weeks for a standard site, longer for ecommerce or applications, and include ninety days of post-launch support before any maintenance plan starts.
How it works
Scope around the money pages
We define which service and location pages have to earn, what each one must prove, and the sitemap follows from that instead of from a template.
Wireframe before pixels
Structure and copy hierarchy are agreed in low fidelity, so arguments about layout happen when they are cheap to resolve.
Design in Figma
A full design system and page-by-page mockups you review and approve. Nothing goes to development on a maybe.
Build and instrument
Mobile-first development with schema, analytics, call tracking and CRM integration wired in during the build rather than patched afterward.
Migrate and launch
Redirect map, metadata migration, cross-device QA, then launch with rank and error monitoring running daily for the first thirty days.
Maintain or hand over
Ninety days of support is included. After that you either take the keys or we keep it patched, backed up, fast and edited on request.
From $3,500 one-time: 3500
Frequently asked questions
- How much does a website cost?
- A project build runs $3,500 to $6,500 one time, covering a custom design system, up to ten pages including service and location pages, on-page SEO and schema, mobile-first development and CRM-integrated lead forms. Ecommerce stores and web applications start higher because of the integration work involved. Optional maintenance is $150 to $250 per month depending on how often you need edits.
- How long does it take to build a website?
- Three to six weeks for a standard marketing site once content and brand assets are in hand. Ecommerce builds run six to ten weeks because of catalogue, payment, shipping and tax configuration. The single biggest cause of delay is waiting on client content, so we provide the copy structure up front and can write it for you if that keeps the project moving.
- Do you build WordPress websites?
- Yes, when WordPress is the right answer, which is usually when your team publishes frequently and wants to work in a familiar editor. We build a custom theme with no page builder, a deliberately short plugin list and caching configured before launch. For most local service businesses we recommend a statically rendered React site instead, because it loads faster and has no plugin attack surface to maintain.
- Will a redesign hurt my search rankings?
- Only if it is done carelessly. We inventory every existing URL, map each to a destination, ship 301 redirects at launch, migrate metadata and schema, and monitor rankings daily for thirty days afterward. Done that way, redesigns typically improve rankings because the new site is faster and better structured. Done without a redirect map, they routinely cost businesses half their organic traffic overnight.
- Can I update the site myself after launch?
- Yes. Every build ships with editable content areas and a walkthrough recording for your team covering text edits, image swaps, adding a service and publishing a post. Anything structural, such as a new page template or an integration, is either a maintenance plan request or a small scoped project. You own the code and hosting either way, so you are never locked in.
- Do you write the content for my website?
- We can. Most clients supply raw material such as service lists, pricing, photos and a few sentences on what makes them different, and we write the pages from that. Copy is written for search intent and conversion at the same time, which means naming the service and the town, stating price ranges where you allow it, and answering the objections your sales calls already surface.