Web design and development
Websites built by hand
Custom WordPress themes written from nothing, for small businesses across South Florida who are tired of a site that loads slowly and cannot be changed without breaking something.
Most small business sites in Florida were built on a page builder. Elementor, Divi, WPBakery, or a marketplace theme with a builder bolted on. It is a reasonable choice for a $900 project and it is the reason those sites are slow.
A page builder has to be able to render any layout anyone might ever drag onto the canvas, so it ships the code for all of them. That is typically 300 KB of CSS and JavaScript before your first word of content loads, plus a dozen plugins the theme demands to function. Two years later nobody can update anything because the plugins have gone out of sync.
I do not use them. Every site I build is a theme written specifically for that business, containing only the code that business needs. It is faster, it is smaller, it keeps working when WordPress updates, and it can be maintained by any competent developer years from now.
What is included
The actual scope of work
Design first, in the browser
You approve a real working page you can scroll on your phone before anything else is built. Not a flat mockup that looks nothing like the finished thing.
A theme written for you
No parent theme, no builder, no framework. The code that ships is the code your site uses.
Content structure that ranks
Sitemap, URL structure and heading hierarchy planned before the design starts, because retrofitting that later is where budgets go to die.
Forms that actually arrive
Gravity Forms, configured with spam protection, proper routing and confirmation, tested end to end before launch.
Speed as a requirement, not a hope
Images sized and converted, fonts subset, render blocking removed, Core Web Vitals measured before we go live rather than after.
A launch that does not break email
DNS cutover planned in advance. Mail records are never touched. Old URLs are mapped to new ones so links and rankings survive.
Worth knowing
What you actually get
A site you own outright, on hosting you control, with no license renewals and no monthly fee to keep the design working.
If you and I part ways in three years, you hand the theme folder to another developer and they can read it. That is not true of a page builder site, and it is the single most expensive thing about them.
Questions
Asked often enough
How long does a build take?
A typical small business site runs six to ten weeks from kickoff to launch. The variable is almost never the code. It is how quickly content and approvals come back.
Can I edit the site myself afterwards?
You can publish and edit articles freely. Page layouts are intentionally fixed so the design cannot be accidentally broken. Copy changes come back to me and are usually turned around same day.
Do I have to move hosting?
Not necessarily, but if your current host is the reason the site is slow, moving is the cheapest performance win available and I will say so.
What happens to my existing rankings?
Every existing URL gets mapped to its closest equivalent on the new site with a permanent redirect. Done properly, a rebuild does not cost you rankings.
Related
Usually run alongside this
Technical SEO
Crawlability, indexation, page speed, schema and site architecture. The unglamorous back end work that decides whether any of your other marketing spend can actually pay off.
Local SEO
Ranking for the searches that happen across Palm Beach County, Broward, Miami-Dade, the Treasure Coast and up to Orlando. The searches with a customer at the end of them.
AI search optimization
A growing share of searches now end with an answer rather than a list of links. Being the source that answer quotes is a different discipline from ranking, and most agencies have not started on it.
Further reading
Written on this specifically
Start here
Tell me what you are trying to fix
Send over the site you have now, or the one you wish you had. I will tell you honestly whether I am the right person for it.
info@palmprojects.com