Thorne Web Designs

Besides the incredibly important things like security and maintainability, the main draw of a custom-coded website over a Wordpress site, or other page builder sites, is the load time. You might get conflicting advice on whether page speed matters and it really honestly does. Especially for small businesses. Amazon can have a performance score of 2/100 and won’t lose business because they’re Amazon and people will use them regardless of how fast their site is. As a small business, we don’t have that luxury and we need every advantage we can get, especially if we want to save money.

The way we do this is by making sure the website, especially the landing page, has a performance score of 95+ which improves your Core Web Vitals. The better your Core Web Vitals, the better you’ll rank in the Google search results. This is because Google wants to prioritize websites that are user-friendly and provide a good experience. It goes without saying, better search ranking is a good thing. It means people will find you easier when they search for the products or services you sell and leads to savings in the advertisement department.

Any additional page past 5 pages is a one-time payment of $100. The monthly subscription rate does not change.

After the mock-up (made in Figma) is finalized and approved, the website will be delivered in no more than 30 days. You will have 10 days to test anything you want to test with this version (Alpha). Once it’s approved, I will get up to 10 days to make these changes and you will get another period of 10 days to test out the website with the changes (Beta). This will be the last chance to make changes before it goes to live - once the Beta is approved, it will be pushed to live. If you have no change requests, the Alpha will move forward to live.

Obviously, all of this is subject to communication speed, whether the website takes a total of 1 month or 2 months is dependent on how soon the client responds at any point in the process. I don’t like to work like other developers and have multiple projects going at once as I find quality can drop off quickly that way, so my work flow is generally exclusive to your website after the contract is signed.

I offer two subscription plans, a 6 month and a 12 month contract. Depending on which one you choose, the contract lasts for a minimum of their respective times, and the payments are monthly. Once that minimum time has passed, you can cancel at any time - the code, and thus the website, will remain with me (the domain will remain with you, even if I obtained it for you).

It's a one-time payment of $3500. You can choose to retain my services for hosting and unlimited edits for a discounted rate of $25 and $50 a month, respectively. Otherwise, once you buy it, the code is yours. I will zip it and send it to you, and you can do whatever you want with it. I should stress it is pure code - HTML and CSS (with a sprinkle of Javascript), so not overly complicated code, but if you don’t know how to code, you will probably not know how to do anything with it, unless you took the time to learn it all - or hired someone else to manage it.

If you cancel before your respective contract is over, or simply stop paying, you owe the full cost of what the site would normally cost ($3500) minus whatever you already paid, but the code stays with me. I prioritize relationships with my clients that are long-term partnerships - my goal is to work with you and make it so you never want to cancel.

If you choose not to re-sign with me after your contract ends, the code stays with me - it’s my intellectual property - the domain will be transferred to you, and you will not owe anything else.

If you cancel before your contract ends, you owe the full cost of the site, which is $3500, minus what you’ve already paid and the code stays with me.

Life happens and it sucks, honestly. If something catastrophic happens - say the business goes under, the contract is void, no penalty fees involved. If the business is for whatever reason incapacitated for a period of time - for example flooding in a restaurant and the repairs are going to take a few months - the contract will be suspended. The website will be taken down and no payments will be made. If you wish for the website to not be taken down, which is better to maintain your online presence, you can keep making the monthly payments (you can use those unlimited edits to tell your customers you’ll be closed for x months on the landing page!).

Every invoice comes with a 7 day grace period. If you don’t pay within that 7 day period, there will be a $20 late fee applied - I will usually send an email here to remind you of your payment. If there are multiple monthly invoices that are overdue for months and late for months, I can cancel the contract and the client will be responsible for paying the full price of the site. I am generally very flexible and understanding of certain situations and oftentimes offer assistance and help. But if there is no communication or replies to my messages, I have to take certain precautions to make sure I am paid for my time and effort in making the site and not being taken advantage of.

When we first start working together, a $150 payment will be made as I start work on the mock-up. This will cover that month’s cost of making the mock-up and the website before the rest of the monthly payments continue. Between the design and the making of the website, there is a period where you can cancel and that initial $150 will be refunded. This is usually because I can’t design something you are 100% happy with and you simply no longer want to move forward with me. If the mock-up gets approved and the work begins on building the site, there are no refunds after that point.

That having been said, I'm not heartless and I do understand life can be. I am always willing to make exceptions depending on the situation.

A lot of other developers that have this business model don't allow this, but I like to be more forgiving so I've made it a choice, as long as you've completed a subscription plan. For example, if you signed a 6 month contract and decided you wanted to own the code and manage it yourself, you can wait til the end of that 6 months and pay the original $3500 minus the amount you've already paid. I'll zip it and send it - you'll still have the choice to retain my services for the discounted amount, but that's entirely optional.

Always. If you come to me with a domain or if I bought the domain for you, it is yours. If you cancel your subscription at any time, I will transfer the domain to you.

It's pretty simple, you can do whatever you want with your website using the code I wrote for you - you can change it, you can delete it, you can add onto it until it's 5000 lines long, whatever. The only thing you can't do is sell it; this includes specific elements or pages. In the event of the sale of the business itself, the code/website can be transferred to the new owner without issue.

No catch. Design trends change, Google’s search algorithms change, your personal brand or tastes change - it would be annoying (and expensive!) to have to pay for every single edit to your website. This is all edits, from changing the font to redesigning a whole page, anything goes. Although ideally, you’re happy with the initial design that you don’t need me to redesign a whole page after I make the website!

You send an email to thornewebdesigns@gmail.com and it will be added to my workflow for that day. If it’s an extensive edit (like that full page redesign you hopefully don’t need) I would most likely need up to a week to complete it. If any changes involve colors, a hex code is much appreciated, i.e. #03e5ed.

Once I complete the work, I will send you a screenshot of what the changes look like for you to approve before I push to the live site.