Web Design and Development in Michigan
Your expertise is complicated. Your website shouldn't be.
Hey there! I’m Brandon. I build websites for consultants, non-profits, and people who spent years learning something complicated and now have to explain it in a hurry. You’ll get a price before anything starts, a link you can watch it happen on, and someone who picks up the phone three years later.
Fixed project pricing, quoted before we start. Or buy a block of hours, if a whole project is more than you need.
CQ Fellows Certification Program
Grow Consultancy • UK
Movement is Life Health Equity Nonprofit • Detroit
CQ Fellows • Grow • Movement is Life
What the job actually is
Make communicating a complicated idea seem effortless.
You’ve probably spent years getting good at something that takes real effort to explain, but your website only gets about nine seconds to explain it on your behalf. That isn’t much. The reassuring part is that those nine seconds don’t have to do the whole job. They only have to earn the next nine seconds. Most of my work is quietly making sure that keeps happening, all the way down the page.
ye-olde-website.com
a bio
a capabilities deck
the newsletter nobody reads
a headshot (2017)
2019-strategy-FINAL (2).pdf
A Lot Of Questions
yourperfectwebsite.com
You bring the material. I work out the story.
Almost everybody arrives convinced they have nothing to work with, and almost everybody turns out to be wrong. There’s usually an old site, a deck, a bio, a few documents that felt important at the time. My job is to sit with all of it, ask rather more questions than you’re expecting, and work out what this site is really for — what belongs first, what follows from it, and what can gently be left out. If a page needs words that don’t exist yet, we’ll draft them from what you already have, and you’ll make them sound like you.
What you approve is what ships
Because I do both the designing and the building, what you sign off on is what you get. The spacing, the type, the small decisions that made it feel like yours: they all survive the trip. Nothing quietly slips away between the design and the code, which is where things usually disappear.
Ambitious is allowed
If you’ve been quietly talking yourself out of a more complicated project, like a resource library, a members’ area, or something that talks to a system you already run, don’t worry. Ten years of building software for large organizations means that if it’s genuinely the right answer, it’s buildable. Ambition is the easy part.
The projects I'm proudest of are the ones where the client came out the other side describing their own business better than they could when we started. That happens more often than you'd expect, and it's the best part of the job.
The Work
I specialize in these kinds of projects, but I can handle just about anything.
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A credential people apply to
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Skilled Expert
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Complicated, explained fast
How It Works
Four steps, with a gate at step two.
The first two steps only cost a conversation. At the gate, you decide whether to carry on. If the answer is no, we’re square.
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Tell me the story A 30-minute conversation about what you're actually trying to do and how I can help you comes first. If it turns out I'm not the right person, you'll know here instead of three weeks later.
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A scope and fixed price I'll write up the plan and put a price and a launch date on it. From then on, nothing changes unless you change your mind about something. That's the decision point. You have real numbers before you've committed to anything.
You Decide Here
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I build where you can watch You'll have a live link from early on, and I wireframe as I go, so there's no big reveal at the end. If something's heading somewhere you don't love, you'll see it while it's still easy to change.
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A proper handover I hand off control of the site and a manual written in plain English, along with an hour of training. You'll already have my phone number, which will still work for whenever you need anything.
The Part Nobody Puts on a Website
You won't have to chase anybody.
A website project quietly touches a lot of moving parts: a domain registrar, a web host, an email provider, and other stuff that someone else may have set up and never documented. Sorting all of that out is just part of my job rather than an extra.
Domains and DNS
I handle domain transfers, DNS records, proxies, and Cloudflare so that your site stays healthy, reachable, and safe.
Hosting and Email
Moving your current site to somewhere reliable while keeping your mail flowing and your SSL certificate alive is an art. If anything goes wrong while I’m working, reach out and I’ll fix it.
Whatever's already there
For existing sites, you’ll get a plugin review, a theme review, and anything you depend on that needs fixing, gets it.
Ten years in, there isn't much left in this category I haven't met before. Most of it I can see coming — which is the real reason it so rarely turns into a phone call on your end.
5
One More Thing
Five hours of warranty time, with every project. It never expires.
Use it next week, or in three years when you need something new that the manual doesn’t cover. Even if you forget the arrangement exists at all, it’s still there when you need help late on a weeknight and you shoot me an email. I’ll let you know how much time is left and get you fixed up.
What It Costs
Four ways to hire me.
Three of them are projects, with a price agreed before I start. The fourth is simply hours, for when a whole project is more than you need.
Project • Fixed Price
Credibility Site
from
$3000
You need to exist, reflect your brand, and give people a way to reach you. A great many excellent businesses need exactly this and nothing more.
- Brochure, bio, services, contact
- Training session and a written manual
- Five hours of warranty time
Project • Fixed Price
Most Common
Consultancy Site
from
$5000
You have services to explain, work worth showing, and clients who do their due diligence before committing to you.
- Resource library, gated content, and/or booking system
- Training session and a written manual
- Five hours of warranty time
Project • Fixed Price
Custom Project
Quoted
You need a full-service shop, a members’ area, or a platform migration. These get quoted after we discuss details, because nuance can dramatically shift the price.
- E-commerce, member portals, integrations, migrations
- Training session and a written manual
- Five hours of warranty time
Hours • Pay as you go
A Block of Hours
per hour
$100
For when you don’t have a project — you have a Tuesday. Something broke, something needs moving, something has to exist by Thursday.
- Six hours — $600
- Twelve hours — $1,200
- The point is you stop watching the clock
A project has a fixed price and a launch date. If it runs long, that’s mine to absorb rather than yours to figure out. Hours are simply hours: when they run out you can buy more, and you’ll always know how many you have left.
Who You'll Actually Work With
Me. That's the
whole org chart.
I have spent over ten years building web-based software inside companies big enough to hold meetings about button colors — millions of dollars of it, delivered on time, which in that world is rarer than it should be. Working for large organizations teaches you what can go wrong at scale, and it turns out to be mostly the same handful of things regardless of size. F12 Crowd takes that experience and applies it to projects small enough to be fun and let me be hands on with every part.
I do the design and the development myself. That sounds like a logistics detail, but it’s where most website projects quietly unravel. Those lost bits sit on the floor in the gap between the person who mocked it up and the person who built it. There’s no gap here. The design and the build are the same person with a persistent through line.
What that decade also taught me is that the hard part was almost never the code. It was more figuring out what how the thing we were building was supposed to work, and getting everyone to agree on that before it was too late to pivot. That’s still the part I care most about, and it’s why our first call begins with your business rather than your website.
Get In Touch
Tell me what you're working on.
Fill out the form and I’ll get back to you within one business day. We’ll meet for 30 minutes, and you’re welcome to do most of the talking. Then I’ll run some numbers for you to review. Even if we decide it isn’t a fit, you’ll come away knowing roughly what your project ought to cost.