A Web Design Company in Detroit That Builds Fast Sites, Not Slow Projects

There is no honest single number, because the work scales with what you need. The drivers are page count, how much copy is written from scratch, integrations like booking or inventory, and whether you sell online. A five-page Royal Oak clinic site and a Sterling Heights parts catalogue are different projects.

Three models. Hourly, where you pay for time and the total moves. Fixed project, where the scope is agreed up front and the number only changes if the scope does. Monthly retainer, where you rent a team. We work fixed project for builds, with an optional retainer after launch.

A focused five-page site takes about a week when the content is ready. Ten to fifteen pages with a blog and lead capture usually runs two to three weeks. Custom builds are scoped individually. Projects rarely stall on design. They stall waiting for photos, logos and approvals.

You can stand up a template in three days. You cannot research a market, write real copy, source images and test properly in three days. Our Starter tier ships in seven because that is the honest floor for a site we will put our name on.

It plans, designs, builds and launches your website, then makes sure it loads fast and gets found. A full-service shop also writes the copy, sets up analytics, adds schema so AI assistants quote you accurately, handles redirects on launch day, and trains your team.

Build it yourself if the site is a placeholder and nobody is searching for you yet. Hire someone once the site has a job: generating quotes, booking appointments, or convincing a procurement team you are a real supplier. The break point is when one lost lead costs more than the build.

No portfolio of live URLs you can open right now. Refusing to name the platform. A proposal with no page list and no date. Your domain or hosting staying in their name. Guaranteed number-one rankings, which nobody can promise. And a quote that arrives without one question about your business.

Yes, and the reason has changed. It used to be about being findable. Now it is also the source AI assistants read when someone asks them to recommend a plumber, a clinic or a supplier in metro Detroit. Your own site is the only place you control what they learn about you.

Look for a street address you can find on a map, not a suite that resolves to a mail service. Check whether the portfolio links to live Michigan businesses. Ask to meet. Local is not always better, but a company implying a presence it does not have has told you something.

Say who you are and what you do above the fold. Make the next action obvious on every page. Load fast on a mid-range phone. Work for keyboard and screen reader users. Keep it current, because a stale site reads as a closed business.

A teaching framework: Content, Clarity, Consistency, Credibility, Convenience, Call to action and Conversion. It is a checklist, not a law. The useful part is that six of the seven are about whether a visitor understands and trusts you. Only one is about the click. Most sites get that ratio backwards.

The rough idea that a visitor decides whether to stay within about three seconds. Treat it as a design prompt, not a measured law. The testable version is public: Google recommends Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds for 75% of visits. That is the number we build against.

A home page stating what you do and who for. One page per service, because that is what people search. An about page with real faces and a real address. Contact details plus a form that works. Proof, whether reviews, logos or photos of finished work. And a privacy page.

It writes working code and a decent first draft, and we use AI in our own workflow daily. It cannot decide what your Detroit customers care about, align your Google Business Profile, set redirects so you keep rankings, or notice when the contact form quietly stops sending. Generation is the easy part.

It is replacing the mechanical parts: first drafts, resizing, boilerplate, alt text. It has not replaced judgement about what a page should say, what to cut, or how a supplier convinces an engineer to request a quote. Designers who only pushed pixels are losing work. The rest are busier.

Design decides what the site says and how it looks. Development makes it work in a browser. A brochure site is mostly the first. A booking system or a parts catalogue flips that ratio. Most projects need both, which is why splitting them across two vendors usually costs more.

It can, and it is a separate job from ranking on Google. AI engines pull from pages they can crawl and parse cleanly: server-rendered HTML rather than content that only appears after JavaScript runs, real heading structure, FAQ and Service schema, and a robots.txt allowing GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot.

Yes, most of our metro work sits outside the city line. Royal Oak, Ferndale, Birmingham, Troy, Southfield, Dearborn, Warren, Sterling Heights, Novi and Ann Arbor are all normal. It matters, because a Ferndale studio and a Troy firm compete in different local packs even twenty minutes apart.

Yes, and it is a different build from a consumer site. Engineering and procurement buyers want capability pages, certifications, tolerances, spec sheet downloads and an RFQ form that reaches a real person. The region holds more than 99,000 engineers, so assume a technical reader who bounces off vague marketing language.

Yes. Those sites live or die on mobile: a menu that opens instantly, hours that are correct, a reservation link that works, and a Google Business Profile matching the site exactly. We build them light so they load on a phone outside the door in Corktown or on Nine Mile.

You do, completely. You get the Next.js codebase in a repository you control and the full design file. No licence fee, no proprietary platform, no clause tying the site to us. If you move to another developer next year, nothing breaks.

A 30-day support window covers bugs, fixes and training questions at no extra charge, and we record the handover so new staff can watch it later. After that you can self-manage, hire anyone you like, or keep us on a maintenance plan. All three are normal.