A new business website in three weeks

The situation

Many small businesses sit on a website that was once put up by a nephew or a cheap vendor, then left for years. Quality has dropped while the business has grown. Pages load slowly, mobile looks scrappy, the CMS is outdated and risky, and nobody at the company knows how it fits together anymore.

These businesses also have no budget and no appetite for a three-month engagement with design sprints and stakeholder workshops. They want a clean site, live soon, with hosting that works and email that lands properly.

What we did

We ran a fixed-price project with a fixed delivery date:

Week 1: conversation about what the site should do (six pages, a contact form, a handful of reference projects), inventory of existing copy and imagery, a simple design proposal within their existing brand. No design workshops; a couple of revision rounds on the mockup before we started building.

Week 2: build on a modern stack (Next.js + Vercel hosting), responsive layout, working contact form, baseline SEO and analytics, hosting + domain migrated, email properly configured (SPF/DKIM/DMARC so their mail stopped landing in spam).

Week 3: review with the client, small copy tweaks, content filled in, old site retired, new site live. Closing call with handover: what they can change themselves via a simple CMS panel, and which questions to call us about.

What it delivered

After three weeks:

- Page load time from an average of 4.2 seconds to under 1 second. - Lighthouse scores above 95 on all four axes (performance, accessibility, best practices, SEO). - Mobile rendering that holds up on every common screen size. - A contact form that actually delivers messages (the old one was silently dropping them). - Hosting and email combined for 25 euro a month, with automatic backups.

Fixed project cost agreed up front; no extra-work invoices. Since then we run a small quarterly update round at a fixed 350 euro.

What this wasn't

No three-month design engagement with stakeholder workshops. No WordPress with thirty plugins each on their own update cycle. No opaque hourly rate that never seems to end. What it was: a fixed price, a fixed date, and a site they can maintain themselves for years without us.