Designed to look exactly the way you want.
Built to work for everyone.

A managed website, with people responsible for it

A Forged Site replaces the public CMS and page-builder workflow with a managed codebase. MOG, our AI Site Director, works with the site’s context, previous decisions and constraints. It helps carry out the work; our team remains accountable for the result. You can ask for an update in everyday language instead of translating it into a developer ticket.

Every plan includes hosting, Cloudflare edge delivery and SSL, site operations, backups, and ongoing reviews. Your client portal is where you review the audit trail and approve blog posts. Portfolio updates are requested from your account manager. We handle the technical maintenance so you do not have to keep a stack of plugins current yourself.

You approve blog posts from the portal or by email. Portfolio updates are requested from your account manager. Core pages (home, services, about, contact and the rest of the main site) are not open to an unreviewed live editor. That is how we keep the site closer to WCAG 2.2 AA: a small unreviewed change on a main page is enough to break heading order, contrast, labels or keyboard access. Those pages move through a change order, with an account manager review during work hours, on purpose.

What happens when you ask for a change?

We review the request, clarify anything uncertain and confirm the scope. AI assists with the implementation, and your account manager reviews material changes during work hours before publication. Small, clear updates can often be handled the same business day. Larger work, unclear instructions, third-party dependencies and requests outside business hours need an agreed schedule. The brief determines the turnaround, not the time it takes to press Deploy.

You can request a conversation with a designer or a code-aware team member. Google Meet and phone calls are available by arrangement. An emergency should be reported directly so we can assess it and respond; routine content work and urgent incidents are different queues.

A record of the work

We keep the request history and the record of what changed. That helps us investigate an issue, recover the previous version when appropriate, and identify a correction we owe you. When a miss is ours to any degree, fixing it does not consume your change orders.

An earlier internal sample of 54 completed changes had a median turnaround of five minutes. That is a historical sample, not a response-time guarantee or an independent audit. Your request receives its own scope and timing.

Backups and pre-change recovery points are part of the operating process. Recovery depends on what failed and what needs restoring. Backups are not a promise that a site can never go offline, or that every recovery is instantaneous.

A useful starting point for your blog

DraftDash researches topics relevant to your business and prepares articles on your plan’s schedule. Its purpose is to keep a useful flow of material moving when you do not have time to write every week. It gives your website an active baseline that you can improve with the things only your business knows.

Your own work makes the strongest starting material. Send a photo from a recent job, a customer question or a few sentences about a project. We can turn that into an article grounded in your experience. You can choose subjects, supply images, check references and tell us when a topic misses the mark.

AI-assisted writing does not automatically reproduce your personal voice or know an unpublished detail about your business. Research and citations can contain mistakes. Drafts pass through our quality checks. You review and approve them in the portal or by email before they publish. If our work contains an error, correcting it is our responsibility.

Volume follows the plan: Lite includes one post per month; Basic four to five; Standard around ten; Professional around twenty to twenty-two; Ultimate publishes daily, roughly twenty-eight to thirty-one per month. Frequency is an allowance, not a promise of a particular search ranking or number of leads.

Ethel, your AI front desk

Ethel helps capture and route customer inquiries with business-specific context. Depending on the plan and configuration, that can mean conversational forms, multilingual interaction, an audio route for visitors who would rather speak, or drafts routed to the right department. A drafted reply is a draft, not a commitment made on your company’s behalf.

Spam filtering helps reduce unwanted submissions; it cannot promise that every bad message is blocked or every legitimate inquiry is classified perfectly. Your inquiry records and follow-up remain important.

Ethel is included from Basic upward, with the levels listed in the full plan comparison. Lite does not include Ethel. Advanced voice and knowledge features are tier-specific and configured with you, rather than assumed to be running on every site. If a conventional contact form is a better fit, we can discuss that too.

The blog supports categories, author information and RSS. Portfolios and testimonials can give your business’s actual work a home alongside the researched content. Those first-hand materials are worth bringing into the brief.

Keep the ability to change

Customers discover businesses through Google, maps, directories, recommendations and AI assistants. Nobody can reliably tell you what that mix will look like in three years. We design around being able to respond when your business or the channels around it change.

The site’s code is refined for its purpose and maintained by the same team that runs it. Updating a layout, content structure or integration does not require waiting for several unrelated theme and plugin vendors to agree on a feature. Traditional platforms can evolve too; the difference here is who takes responsibility for making the change for you.

What Catori reviews

Catori supports a monthly review of search visibility and opportunities. Where your Google Search Console and Analytics access is connected, we can examine page performance, queries, traffic patterns and conversion paths. The report puts technical findings and content opportunities into a form you can act on.

SEO helps people find you through conventional search. AEO and GEO describe work on how useful, understandable and discoverable your information is to answer engines and generative search systems. No technique guarantees an AI recommendation, a specific ranking or a sale.

Why BrightLocal and the data aggregators are still in the plans

Consistent business information across relevant directories is one part of a local presence. BrightLocal submits your business name, address, phone, and more to data aggregators, which pass that information on to many directories, maps and assistants. The networks on these plans are Data Axle, Foursquare, and on Standard and above, Neustar Localeze and Yellow Pages. Professional and Ultimate cover the major aggregators. Ultimate adds fifty extra directories. Lite does not include a citation package. That BrightLocal page lists what each network is and what it costs before a plan includes it. A BrightLocal submission is one run. Running it again, including to correct a problem with the first run, is a new purchase at your expense. We confirm that cost before the new run.

This is old-school local SEO, and we will not dress it up as something newer than it is. Current research still finds that directory presence improves the odds of being the business an assistant recommends. That may change. When it does, we change what we do for you. Additional directory citations beyond a plan are $2 each.

Included maintenance and corrections to our own work do not become new charges simply because advice changes. A new page, campaign or feature you request may use change orders. We explain that distinction and agree on the scope first.

Remove what a marketing page does not need

Our public marketing-page architecture avoids a visitor-facing CMS administration screen and a marketplace of plugins attached to it. The pages can be served without asking a content database a question for every visit. Reducing these moving parts reduces the things that must be configured, maintained and defended on that surface.

This is an architectural choice, not a claim that there are no software dependencies. Hosting, application libraries, network services, forms and any connected systems still need maintenance. Cloudflare adds edge delivery, SSL and protection features; backups support recovery. A website remains software connected to the internet.

What happens when your business needs records or logins?

A client portal, member area or custom records system can have its own controlled access. That is separate from a public page-loading path. We scope its data, permissions and integrations as an application, rather than pretending an interactive system has the same risks as a brochure page.

The trade-off is real: you do not get a visual builder on the public site to make an unreviewed edit yourself. You request the work through the managed service. If hands-on editing is your central requirement, we should discuss a conventional CMS before you buy.

Fast pages and less complexity help the experience, but load speed still depends on images, embeds, analytics and other services. We optimize and measure the actual page. We do not promise that every third-party script will behave or that a site cannot ever be compromised.

Aim high. Check the actual experience.

We strive to meet WCAG 2.2 Level AA as fully as possible and support accessible use of your site. Our process combines automated testing with human review of criteria a scanner cannot settle. Accessibility is part of the build and ongoing care, not an overlay we add at the end.

Our goal is to clear the applicable failures in the automated checks we run, then work through the manual items. Those include keyboard access, meaningful reading and focus order, the usefulness of text alternatives, understandable form errors, and how interactions work with assistive technology. The relevant checks depend on what is on the page.

Vigil supports regular scans and review of findings. Your account manager evaluates the results, works through items requiring judgment and follows up on issues. A passing automated report covers the checks and pages tested. It is not evidence that every possible online tool will return the same result, or that every criterion has been met.

Your design choices, explained clearly

If a design choice you want conflicts with an accessibility criterion, we explain the barrier and suggest alternatives. If you choose to keep it, we document that decision and the remaining limitation, while continuing to meet as many other criteria as we can. The exception remains an exception; we do not label it compliant because it was requested.

Your brand and how you want your business presented matter. So does explaining what a visual or interaction choice means for the people using the site. The goal is an informed decision and the best accessible result the agreed design can achieve.

What we do not guarantee

A Forged Sites plan does not provide a 100% WCAG or ADA compliance guarantee, legal immunity or a financial guarantee against a claim. Technical testing and human review help identify barriers and improve the site; they do not decide a legal outcome. Content changes and third-party features can also affect the result over time.

W3C explains what automated accessibility tools can and cannot check.

The request is the starting point

A change order is an agreed piece of work: a complete, coordinated request rather than a string of unrelated jobs. One order can often cover three or four new pages, or six to eight blog or portfolio posts, or adding a piece of functionality such as a membership area. A seasonal promotion, a new section, or a package of related copy updates also fits. We agree on what fits before we start.

Clarifying the same email request does not turn each reply into another order. The person confirming the work determines the agreed scope. If a request needs several orders, we tell you how many and why, beforehand. A member login with even a modest backend is a typical example of work that takes three or more change orders. You can split that work over your monthly allowance, the annual five, or a pack. We never start heavy work and bill you after.

For people who already think in AI work: a typical change order is usually around 500,000 tokens of model work, plus a human reviewing it before anything reaches your site. We do not stop a job that runs to 750,000. If a request is clearly going to take a lot more time and processing — the kind of job that wants two passes — we tell you it will use two change orders before we start. Scope is the promise. The number is a size picture, not a meter on your invoice. Token counts also move from one model to another, which is why we do not sell them as the unit.

Questions that we can simply answer are free. Corrections to our own work, typos, broken links and issues we caused are not billed against your allowance. A genuine research or development investigation can be a change order, but we ask first. Its result should be an answer and a practical plan for what comes next.

Three kinds of allowance

• Your plan’s monthly allowance renews with the service period. Unused monthly orders do not roll over.
• Every account receives five extra orders each service year, including existing accounts. They are available during that service year and renew on its anniversary.
• Purchased packs are valid for 12 months from purchase, with their own expiry date. They do not all expire at the end of the calendar year. Three cost $199, five cost $299 and ten cost $499.

We spend monthly orders first, then the five annual orders, then a purchased pack. A pack fixes the price of that work allowance for its validity period. It is prepaid work you can use when needed, not unlimited labor for a year. Ask the team to add a pack; we confirm the purchase and expiry with you.

A directly opened MOG chat work session can consume a change order at the start. The portal explains that before you open a chargeable session. That is distinct from emailing a question, and the same protection for correcting our own mistakes applies.

New pages can be scoped through orders or purchased for $45 each, one-time. More substantial custom functionality may require several orders or a separate scope. We give you the choice before committing the work. If a request is clearly going to take more than one order, we say so up front and wait for you to decide.

Build the part your business actually needs

Sometimes a website needs a quote flow, an events directory, a member area or a small records system. Sometimes it needs to connect to software you already use. We start with the actual process and scope the missing part.

If an existing CRM, scheduling system or business application is working well, it may make more sense to connect it than replace it. Where a small custom component is a better fit, it can live alongside the site with the appropriate access controls and data model.

Asking what is possible costs nothing. A real investigation that needs development work is scoped as a change order with your agreement. We return the answer along with a build path and an estimate of the work, rather than letting a research question silently become a project.

We cannot promise an integration without checking the other system’s capabilities and access requirements. Third-party subscriptions or usage costs remain separate unless specifically included. A substantial application requires its own scope.

Where another platform fits better

These plans do not include an e-commerce store with a shopping cart, inventory and checkout. We also build on WordPress, WooCommerce, Shopify and other platforms when those fit the business. If you need a traditional CMS or a store, we will explain the appropriate build and price it separately.

Before launch

The initial working draft lets you assess the direction before accepting a contract. Before the site goes live, either party can decide not to proceed, with no buyout. No monthly fee is charged until the site is live. We absorb the initial build work if you do not proceed under that arrangement.

During the term

Your own branding, photographs, copy and trademarks remain yours. The agreement allows us to use them to build the site and to make images for it, with AI tools where that work needs them. During the agreed term, the hosted site is our property and is licensed to you. There is no separate design invoice because the design build, AI tokens and cost are carried inside the monthly arrangement. The commitment is how that unpaid build is paid for. Leaving early after launch therefore carries an agreed buyout that reduces as the term progresses. The formula, the cap, and worked examples for each plan are in the standard agreement (PDF), Section 8.

At the end, or following an early-exit buyout

You receive the site export: its page templates and generated HTML, site design assets and media, a current snapshot of relevant database content, and deployment instructions. We do not charge a separate export fee. The continuing AI systems, SaaS tools and underlying frameworks remain ours and are not transferred as operating services.

After the commitment, the agreement converts to month-to-month at the plan’s monthly fee. You can cancel that with thirty days’ notice, and there is no buyout. If you prepaid at a discount, the continuing monthly price is the standard undiscounted plan fee. The agreement sets the exact terms for your account.

A conventional project-based build is also available, with its own price and without this subscription commitment. Ongoing AI services are not bundled into that alternative unless separately purchased. We can show you both approaches.

Included infrastructure and fair use

Hosting and third-party services are included for typical small-to-mid-size business usage. Unusual traffic, bandwidth or resource demands may require additional paid capacity. We discuss any such upgrade and its cost before it is incurred.

This is a plain-language summary. Review the standard Idea Forge Studios Forged Sites agreement (MSA IFS-1.1.0) and ask us about anything unclear before committing. The signed agreement for your account is the controlling document.