If you're thinking about working with us, you probably want to know who we actually are and how we actually work before you spend a call finding out. Fair enough. So here are the five things that matter most, the ones that tend to make people go "oh, that's different." There's a bonus at the bottom too.
Before we design a single page, we listen.
Most of the failures I've seen in this industry come from the same place: someone built the wrong thing, and built it well. A beautiful website that talks to the wrong people about the wrong things is still a failure. So we don't start with design. We start with understanding your business, your customers, and what you're actually trying to accomplish.
That's the part people underestimate until they've been through it. By the time we design anything, we already know who your site is talking to and what it needs to say. The design isn't guesswork. It's the answer to questions we took the time to ask.
A lot of websites are built by stacking someone else's parts on top of each other. A platform, a theme, a pile of plugins. It works, but every one of those pieces is extra weight and another door someone could pick.
We build differently. Our sites run on our own platform, and we only include what your site actually needs. That means a smaller, cleaner codebase, which means faster load times and fewer places for something to go wrong. No plugin bloat. No stack of third-party parts each waiting on its own security update. Fewer doors, fewer locks to worry about.
And before anything goes live, every site runs through a 17-point pre-launch test. We check the things that quietly break sites and embarrass businesses, before your customers ever see them. When we launch, we've already looked.
Here's something that shouldn't be rare but somehow is. We're organized.
Every project has a project manager. Every task we discuss gets tracked, so the thing you mentioned in week two doesn't quietly disappear by week five. And we meet as a team every week to review what's done and decide what's next. Your project moves forward on a rhythm, not on whoever happens to remember it.
If you've ever hired someone to build something and watched it stall into radio silence, you already know why this matters. You'll always know where your project stands, because we always know.
This is the one that tends to make people exhale.
We don't charge a monthly maintenance fee. A lot of web companies do, because their sites are built on platforms that need constant babysitting. Ours aren't, so we don't. Here's the entire cost of keeping your site running: $300 a year for hosting, and $30 a year for each domain name. Flat. Predictable. We handle the hosting and register your domains, so it's all in one place.
And if something goes wrong with your website after launch, we fix it at no cost. You won't get an invoice for a problem you didn't create. A website you can stop worrying about the day it goes live is the whole idea.
This one's personal.
A portion of every website we build goes toward building a website for a local nonprofit, free of charge. It's been part of how PlusCode works since the beginning. When you hire us, you're not just getting a website. You're quietly helping a church, a food pantry, a community group, or a cause down the road get one too.
We don't do this for the marketing. We do it because we live here, our clients live here, and a business ought to leave its community better than it found it. If that matters to you, know that it's baked into the work, not bolted on for show.
One more, because it surprises people.
Every website we build includes a one-hour professional photo shoot. Real photos of your business, your team, your space, not recycled stock images that ten other companies are also using. We do this because we got tired of building beautiful sites and watching them get filled with mismatched phone snaps and generic stock photos that undercut the whole thing. Good photos of the real you are part of the package, because they're part of what makes a site actually work.
Five things, plus one. We listen first, we build lean and test before we launch, we stay organized so nothing gets lost, we make life after launch painless, and we give back to the community we're part of. And you'll have real photos to show for it.
If that sounds like the kind of team you'd want in your corner, let's talk. Call me at 734-249-8028 or email dave@pluscodedesign.com, and we'll figure out whether we're the right fit for what you're building.
— Dave
Based in the Ann Arbor, MI area, Dave is the lead designer/developer at PlusCode. He specializes in creating unique solutions to help engage and connect with audiences digially.
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