Website redesign for small businesses

A managed site, with people who answer for it

A Forged Site drops the public CMS and the page builder for a codebase we manage. MOG, our AI Site Director, works from the site's context, earlier decisions, and the constraints already in place. It helps carry the work through. Our team stays accountable for the result. An update can be requested in ordinary language. There's no need to recast it as a developer ticket first.

Every plan covers hosting, Cloudflare edge delivery and SSL, site operations, backups, and ongoing reviews. Your client portal is where you look over the audit trail and approve blog posts. For portfolio updates, you ask your account manager. We handle technical upkeep, so you're not the one keeping a stack of plugins current.

You approve blog posts in the portal or by email. Portfolio updates go to your account manager. Core pages (home, services, about, contact, and the rest of the main site) don't let an unreviewed edit go live. That's what holds the site closer to WCAG 2.2 AA: on a main page, a small unreviewed change is enough to break heading order, contrast, labels, or keyboard access. Those pages move by change order, with an account manager review during work hours, on purpose.

Once you ask for a change

We read the request, clear up anything uncertain, and confirm the scope. AI assists during implementation. Material changes get your account manager's review during work hours, before publication. A small, clear update can often be done the same business day. An agreed schedule is required for larger work, unclear instructions, third-party dependencies, or a request outside business hours. Turnaround follows the brief, not how long it takes to press Deploy.

You can request a conversation with a designer or a code-aware teammate. Google Meet and phone calls wait until they're arranged. Bring an emergency straight to us so we can assess it and respond. Routine content and urgent incidents don't share a queue.

The record we keep

We keep the request history and a record of what changed. That lets us look into an issue, put the previous version back when appropriate, and find a correction we owe you. When a miss is ours to any degree, the fix doesn't spend your change orders.

An earlier internal sample of 54 completed changes showed a median turnaround of five minutes, and that figure belongs to a historical internal sample: not a turnaround or response-time guarantee, and not an independent audit. Your request is scoped and timed on its own.

Backups and pre-change recovery points sit in the operating process. Recovery depends on what failed and what has to be restored. A backup isn't a promise that the site can never go offline, or that every recovery is instant.

A baseline the blog can start from

DraftDash researches topics that fit your business and prepares articles on your plan's schedule. The aim is a useful flow of material that keeps moving when you don't have time to write every week. You get an active baseline you can improve with what only your business knows.

Work that's already yours makes the strongest start. Send a photo from a recent job, a question a customer asked, or a few sentences about a project. We can draft an article from that, grounded in experience you had. Choosing subjects, sending images, checking references, and flagging a topic that misses are all open to you.

AI-assisted drafts don't automatically sound like you, and they don't know a detail you haven't published. Research can be wrong, and so can citations. Our quality checks still run. You review and approve in the portal or by email before anything publishes, unless you turn on auto-publishing. An error in our work is ours to correct.

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

Ethel, an AI front desk

Ethel listens. The visitor says it instead of typing it. She routes what she hears to the right department, then transcribes it and pre-fills the contact form for the customer. When the customer hits send, she pre-drafts an email for that department, in that department's tone. The draft is for your team. It isn't sent on its own, and it isn't a commitment made for your company. Depending on the plan, she can also work in more than one language.

She works from spoken audio, which few spam bots can do. Filtering helps cut unwanted submissions. It can't promise every bad message is blocked, or every legitimate inquiry is classified perfectly. Your inquiry records still matter, and so does the follow-up.

Ethel is included from Basic upward, at the levels the full plan comparison lists. Lite doesn't include Ethel. She learns each department's reply style over time. Advanced voice and knowledge features beyond listening, routing, and that draft are specific to the tier and configured with you, not assumed to be on for every site. Where a conventional contact form fits better, we can discuss that option.

The blog supports categories, author details, and RSS. Portfolios and testimonials can give your business's actual work a home next to the researched pieces. Those first-hand materials are worth putting in the brief.

You keep room to change

Customers find businesses through Google, maps, directories, recommendations, and AI assistants. Nobody can say with confidence what that mix will be in three years. We design so we can respond when your business changes, or when the channels around it do.

Code is refined for this site's purpose and maintained by the team that runs it. Updating a layout, content structure, or integration doesn't wait for several unrelated theme and plugin vendors to accept one feature. Traditional platforms can change too. The difference is who is responsible for making your change.

Monthly review from Catori

Catori supports a monthly review of search visibility and the openings around it. Where your Google Search Console and Analytics access is connected, we can look at page performance, queries, traffic patterns, and conversion paths. Technical findings and content openings go into the report in a form you can act on.

SEO is the work of helping people find you through ordinary search. AEO and GEO describe a different job: how useful, understandable, and discoverable your information is to answer engines and generative search systems. Nothing there guarantees an AI recommendation, a specific ranking, or a sale.

Why BrightLocal and the data aggregators stay on the plans

Business details that agree across the directories that matter are one part of a local presence. BrightLocal submits your business name, address, phone, and more to data aggregators. Those firms send it onward to many directories, maps, and assistants. Data Axle and Foursquare are networks on these plans, and on Standard and above so are Neustar Localeze and Yellow Pages. Major aggregators are covered on Professional and Ultimate, and Ultimate brings fifty further directories. Lite doesn't include a citation package. That BrightLocal page names each network and its cost before a plan takes the network on. A plan that includes BrightLocal gets one submission. Any resubmission, including one to fix a problem with the first run, is a new purchase at your expense unless the mistake was ours, and we confirm the cost first.

This is old-school local SEO, and we won't dress it up as something newer than it is. Research that's current still finds that a directory presence improves the odds an assistant recommends your business. The finding may not last. If it fades, the work we do for you changes with it.

Included upkeep, and a correction of our own work, don't become a new charge just because advice changed. A new page, a campaign, or a feature you ask for may sit on change orders. We'll explain which applies, and we'll agree on the scope first.

Left off a marketing page, on purpose

Public marketing pages in this architecture don't carry a CMS administration screen a visitor could open, or a plugin marketplace attached to it. The pages can be served without asking a content database a question on every visit. Fewer moving parts on that surface means less to configure, less to maintain, and less to defend.

The choice is architectural. It's not a claim that software dependencies have vanished. Hosting, application libraries, network services, forms, and any connected system still need upkeep. Edge delivery, SSL, and protection features come through Cloudflare. Backups support recovery. A website is still software on the internet.

When you need records or logins

A client portal, a member area, or a custom records system can have controlled access of its own. That access isn't the path a public page uses to load. We scope the data, the permissions, and the integrations as an application. We don't pretend an interactive system has the same risks as a brochure page.

The trade-off is real. There's no visual builder on the public site for an edit you make yourself without review. You request that work through the managed service. If hands-on editing is what you need most, we should discuss a conventional CMS before you buy.

Fast pages and less complexity help how the site feels. Images, embeds, analytics, and other services still affect how fast a page loads. We optimize the page you actually have, and we measure that page. We don't promise that every third-party script will behave, or that a site can never be compromised.

A high bar, tested on a real visit.

We work to meet WCAG 2.2 Level AA as fully as possible, and to support accessible use of your site. Automated testing is paired with human review on the criteria a scanner can't settle. This belongs to the build and to the care that follows. It's not an overlay added at the end.

Our aim is clearing the applicable failures in the automated checks we run, then working through the manual items. On that list: keyboard access, meaningful reading and focus order, useful text alternatives, form errors a person can understand, and how interactions behave with assistive technology. Which checks apply depends on what's on the page.

Regular scans, and a review of the findings, are what Vigil supports. Your account manager evaluates the results, works through the items that need judgment, and follows up on issues. When an automated report passes, it covers the checks and the pages that were tested. That pass isn't evidence every possible online tool will come back the same, or evidence every criterion has been met.

Design choices, in plain words

When a design you want clashes with an accessibility criterion, we explain the barrier and offer alternatives. If you keep it anyway, we record the decision and the limitation left in place. We keep meeting as many other criteria as we can. An exception stays an exception. Requesting it doesn't make the site compliant.

Your brand matters, and so does how you want the business presented. So does a plain account of what a visual or interaction choice means for people using the site. The aim is an informed decision, and the best accessible result that agreed design can reach.

What these plans don't guarantee

A Forged Sites plan doesn't come with a 100% WCAG or ADA compliance guarantee, and it doesn't come with legal immunity or a financial guarantee against a claim. Technical testing and human review help identify barriers and help improve the site. Those steps don't decide a legal outcome. Over time, content changes and third-party features can affect the result as well.

What the W3C says automated accessibility tools can and can't check.

Scope starts with the request

A change order is an agreed piece of work: one complete, coordinated request, not a string of unrelated jobs. Often, one order covers three or four new pages, or six to eight blog or portfolio posts, or a small piece of new functionality. What also fits is a seasonal promotion, a new section, or related copy updates in one package. We agree on the fit before we start. A fully marketed page is a different scale. A page like this Forged Sites page, with its legal pages and contracts, phone and desktop videos with voiceovers, animations, technical data, calls to action, conversion tracking, and the tuning it takes for every major AI model to read it correctly, can take 5 to 10 change orders.

Replies that only clarify the same email request don't each turn into another order. The person confirming the work sets the agreed scope. If several orders are required, we'll say how many and why before the work begins. A membership system is never one change order: even a member login with a modest backend usually starts at three or four, and grows with the features and data it shows. That work can be split across the monthly allowance, the annual five, or a pack. We don't start heavy work and bill it after the fact.

If you're already thinking about this as AI work, a typical change order is usually around 500,000 tokens of model work, plus a human who reviews it before anything reaches your site. A job that runs to 750,000 isn't one we stop. If a request is clearly going to need a lot more time and processing (the kind of job that wants two passes), we'll tell you it will use two change orders before we start. The promise is the scope. The number is a picture of size, not a meter on your invoice. Token counts move from one model to another, which is why we don't sell tokens as the unit.

A question we can simply answer is free. Corrections to our own work, typos, broken links, and issues we caused aren't billed against your allowance. A genuine research or development investigation can be a change order, but we ask before it starts. What comes back should be an answer and a practical plan for what comes next.

Three forms of allowance

• On your plan, the monthly allowance renews with the service period. Unused orders don't roll over.
• Five extra orders come to every account each service year, existing accounts included. During that service year they're available, and they renew on its anniversary.
• A bought pack is valid for 12 months from the purchase date, with its own expiry. Packs don't all expire when the calendar year ends. Three for $199, five for $299, ten for $499.

Monthly orders are used first, then the five annual orders, then a purchased pack. While it's valid, a pack locks that allowance's price. It's prepaid work for when you need it, not unlimited labor for a year. Ask the team to add a pack. We'll confirm the purchase and the expiry with you.

A MOG chat work session that you open directly can consume a change order at the start. Before a chargeable session opens, the portal explains that. Emailing a question is a separate case, and the same protection still applies when the work is correcting a mistake of ours.

New pages can be scoped through orders, or bought for $20 each, one-time. More substantial custom functionality may need several orders, or a scope of its own. You get the choice before that work is committed. If a request is clearly going to take more than one order, we'll say so up front and wait for you to decide.

What your business actually needs built

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

Where a CRM, a scheduling system, or a business application is already working well, connecting it may make more sense than replacing it. A small custom component, where it fits better, can sit beside the site with the appropriate access controls and data model.

It costs nothing to ask what's possible. A real investigation that needs development work is scoped as a change order, and only with your agreement. You get the answer back, plus a build path and an estimate of the work, rather than a research question quietly turning into a project.

We can't promise an integration without checking the other system's capabilities and its access requirements. A third-party subscription, or a usage cost, stays separate unless it was specifically included. A substantial application needs a scope of its own.

When another platform is the better fit

These plans don't include an e-commerce store with a shopping cart, inventory, and checkout. We also build on WordPress, WooCommerce, Shopify, and other platforms when one of those fits the business. Should you need a traditional CMS or a store, we'll explain the fitting build and price it separately.

Before launch

The initial working draft is there so you can assess the direction before a contract is accepted. Before the site goes live, either party can decide not to proceed, and no buyout applies. You aren't charged a monthly fee until the site is live. If you don't proceed under that arrangement, we absorb the initial build work.

During the term

Your own photographs, copy, logos, and trademarks are always yours. The agreement lets us use them as we build the site and make images for it, with AI tools where the work needs them. Design and marketing are real work, paid monthly instead of up front, which is why there's a term. During the term, while the build is being paid off through the plan, the hosted site and the marketing stay with us, licensed to you. The build is protected by the license during the term. Every plan includes a custom build, whether the job is a new site or a rebuild. Rebuilding an existing site is included. There's no separate design invoice for that build, because the design, the AI tokens, and that cost are carried inside the monthly arrangement. The commitment is what pays for that unpaid build. Leaving early after launch therefore carries an agreed buyout, and that buyout reduces as the term progresses. Starting with no existing site is still a custom build, but it may cost more, quoted up front, because with no existing structure there's more planning to do together. Each plan's formula, cap, and worked examples are in Section 8 of the standard agreement (PDF).

When the term is complete, or after the agreed buyout

You keep the website and the data it has collected, as an export you can move to another system: page templates and generated HTML, design assets and media from the site, a current snapshot of relevant database content, and deployment instructions. Exporting the site doesn't add a separate fee. What doesn't come with you is the marketing services and the AI structure: the continuing AI systems, SaaS tools, and frameworks, as running services.

After the commitment ends, the agreement converts to month-to-month at the plan's monthly fee. You can cancel on thirty days' notice, and there's no buyout. If you prepaid at a discount, the monthly price that continues is the standard plan fee, without that discount. Your account's exact terms are the ones in the agreement.

A conventional project-based build is also available, at its own price, without this subscription commitment. Ongoing AI services aren't bundled into that alternative unless they're purchased separately. We can show both approaches to you.

Infrastructure included, and fair use

Included hosting and third-party services cover typical use for a small-to-mid-size business. Unusual traffic, bandwidth, or resource demand may require additional paid capacity. We discuss any such upgrade, and its cost, before that cost is incurred.

This summary is written in plain language. Before you commit, review the standard Idea Forge Studios agreement for Forged Sites (MSA IFS-1.2.3) and ask us about anything that isn't clear. For your account, the signed agreement is the controlling document.