Plain answers to the questions we get most.

Honest answer: $1,499 is already half what most studios charge, because we don't carry sales reps, account managers, or office overhead — one designer builds your site start to finish. The $499 launch rate is exactly what it says: a price for our first stretch of clients. The work is the same; we'd rather fill the calendar fast than hold out for the higher number. Look at the sites in the Work section — those are all ours, so you can judge what $499 actually buys.

Honest answer: you can, and for some shops they're fine. The trade-off is your time — 20–40 hours to learn the editor, write the copy, pick the photos, wrestle with the cart — and the result tends to look like the template it started as. What $499 buys you with us is those Saturdays back and a site that doesn't look like everyone else's Squarespace. If you have the time and the eye, DIY is real. If you don't, that's the job we do.

Custom design, two rounds of revisions, full build, hosting setup, launch, and one year of light updates (text changes, photo swaps, new hours, etc.). You also get all design files and full ownership of the live site at handoff. No setup fees, no platform fees, no surprise add-ons.

Your domain name (you buy that directly — ~$15/yr — and it's registered in your name). Professional photography of your business (we can recommend a local photographer if needed). Paid SEO campaigns or Google Ads management. Complex custom integrations (third-party POS, inventory sync, custom apps) — these are quoted separately and only if you need them.

Because most local shops aren't built on monthly bills. You pay your insurance yearly, your taxes yearly, your power monthly. A website shouldn't be a monthly puzzle. Our pricing is $499 to launch, then $99/yr starting in year two — that yearly fee covers your domain registration, hosting, security updates, and small content edits like new hours or swapped photos. No surprise monthly bills, no per-feature fees. Cancel anytime — if you stop the yearly care, you keep the site, you just take over hosting and domain renewal yourself.

After you've seen the mockup and decided to proceed. Payment is due in full before we start production on the approved build. You can pay by credit card, ACH, or paper check — whichever is easiest for you. See our refund policy for what happens if you change your mind.

No. After your $499 launch, the only ongoing cost is the yearly Annual Care subscription ($99/yr starting in year two — year one is included). That covers your domain renewal, hosting, security updates, and small content edits. You can cancel anytime — if you cancel, you can either re-subscribe before the next renewal or have us transfer the domain to your own registrar account so you handle it yourself. If you ever want a bigger update — new pages, redesign, new feature — we'll quote that separately and you'll see the number before any work starts.

You'll see a working mockup within 3 business days of reaching out. From your approval to a live site is 5 business days. Total time from first contact to launch is usually under 2 weeks if you're responsive on feedback.

Roughly 2 hours total over the two-week build. About 45 minutes upfront — a phone or email walk-through of your shop, what matters, who your customers are. Then a half hour reacting to the first mockup, and another half hour on the revision. We don't run committees or design reviews. Most clients tell us the heaviest lift was emailing us their hours and a logo file.

Because we don't have agency overhead. No sales reps to brief, no account managers to update, no design committee to review. One person designs your site, builds it, and answers when you call. We use modern tooling (good frameworks, fast static hosting) so the technical setup that takes other shops weeks happens in hours.

No penalty — we know you're running a shop. The 5-business-day clock starts after your approval, not after our delivery. If you need a week to think about the mockup, take a week. The only time we'll close a project is if we don't hear from you at all for 30 days — see our Terms § 6 for that detail.

We'll tell you upfront. If we're slammed, we'll either schedule your build for a specific start date or refer you to another studio we trust. We won't take your money and stall.

Yes — fully, by contract. The site, the design files, and the content are yours. We handle the domain and hosting day-to-day so you don't have to manage another login or remember a renewal. If you ever want everything moved to your own accounts, we're contractually obligated to transfer it on request — no questions, no exit fee.

We do — and the reason is purely practical. Most shop owners don't want to manage a registrar account, remember a renewal, or troubleshoot DNS at midnight. We handle it. The $99/yr annual care (year one is included in your $499 launch — first care charge happens in year two) covers domain registration, hosting, SSL, security updates, and small content edits. If you ever want to take over the domain yourself, you can — we're contractually obligated to transfer it to an account in your name on request, with no exit fee.

Take everything with you — we'll even help you make the move. Because the site is built with standard web tech and hosted on common services, any competent developer or studio can pick it up. No proprietary platform, no migration fee, no hostage situation.

For most updates (hours, photos, descriptions) you can just email us — it's faster than learning an editor for a once-a-month change. If you want self-serve editing for things like new product photos or blog posts, we can set that up during the build at no extra cost. Tell us what you want to be able to edit and we'll wire it up.

Yes — most of what we build is a webstore that takes orders or bookings. We use simple, vendor-neutral tools (Stripe for payments, lightweight commerce where it makes sense) — never the bloated platforms that lock you in or charge you more than you make.

Almost always, yes. Bookings (Vagaro, Boulevard, Resy, Calendly, Acuity, Square Appointments), online ordering and POS (Toast, Square Online, Clover), and email capture (Mailchimp, Klaviyo) all embed cleanly on the sites we build. Tell us what you use during the mockup conversation and we'll confirm it works the way you expect before any payment changes hands. The only ones that fight us are proprietary legacy systems that don't offer embeds or links — and if that's what you're stuck with, we'll tell you honestly.

Yes. We treat redesigns the same as new builds — custom design, no template skin job. We'll help you migrate your existing content and (if useful) your domain. Pricing is the same flat rate, not a markup.

We design mobile-first — over 60% of your visitors will be on phones, so we start there. The site adapts smoothly to phones, tablets, and desktops. We test on real devices before launch, not just emulators.

Your site will be indexed by Google on day one, with the technical groundwork done right — fast load times, mobile-friendly, structured data, clean URLs, sitemap submitted, Google Business Profile linked. Whether you rank #1 for searches is a different question — that depends on your industry, your competitors, your reviews, and your local market. Anyone who promises you a #1 ranking is lying. We give you a clean foundation that competes fairly; the rest is the work of months, not days.

Have both — they do different jobs. Your Google Business Profile is how people find you: hours, phone, reviews, the map pin. That gets you the phone call. Your website is what they see once they're deciding: your photos, your menu, your story, your booking link. That gets you the customer who walks in already convinced. Shops that try to live on the profile alone lose anyone who wants to think about it before calling. The two work together — GBP brings the visit, the site closes it.

Not as part of the build. Those are monthly retainer services and we're not set up for them. We'll happily recommend trustworthy local agencies if that's what you need next.

If you want them, yes — we'll set up a privacy-friendly analytics tool (Plausible or Fathom) at cost. We don't add Google Analytics by default because it slows your site down and sells your visitors' data to advertisers.

Our coverage area is Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, and North Carolina — that's where we're focused. We've worked with clients outside that footprint case by case. If your shop is elsewhere in the US, reach out and we'll let you know if we can take it on.

Because hiring a designer based on a slide deck is a bad deal for you. You can't tell what we'll actually do until you see it. Building the mockup costs us time but earns the trust — and the conversation goes from "should I trust them?" to "should we change this header?" Much better for both sides.

Not a blocker. Most clients launch with iPhone shots — good natural light from inside the front door is more than enough, and we retouch and crop tightly so the framing carries the look. If you want a refresh later, we'll recommend a local photographer (most shops can get a usable shoot for $300–500) and swapping the new photos in is included for the first year. Don't stall a launch over photos — every week you're not online is a week of customers who couldn't find you.

You can keep it as a reference, share it with your team, sleep on it as long as you'd like. The one thing you can't do is take the design to another builder and have them ship it as-is — that crosses into "we did the work, someone else got paid" territory. See our refund policy § 2 for the details.

No minimum on shop size — we work with one-chair barbershops and 5,000 square-foot retail stores alike. The maximum is project complexity: if you need 30 pages with a custom inventory system, that's not the right fit at our flat rate and we'll say so. Most shops fit our standard build comfortably.

For the first 30 days, we fix any defect at no charge. After that, if something breaks because of our build, we'll still fix it — we stand by our work. If it breaks because a third party (your registrar, a payment processor, Google's API) changed something on their end, we'll quote the fix transparently.

For the first year, just email us — light content changes are included. After year one we'll quote any updates upfront; most small edits are $25–$75 and turn around in a day or two. Or, if you'd rather edit it yourself, we can set up a simple admin panel during the build for the content you'll change often.

Hosting runs on modern static hosting (typically Cloudflare Pages or Vercel's free tier) — it has no ongoing fee for most shop-sized sites. If your site ever grows to need a paid plan (heavy traffic, big media library), we'll let you know in advance and you choose how to handle it.

You can cancel anytime from your customer portal — billing stops immediately. The site, content, and design files stay yours regardless. The thing that changes: we stop renewing your domain on your behalf, because that renewal is part of what Annual Care covers. Before your next renewal date, you've got two options. One, re-subscribe to Annual Care and we keep handling everything as before. Two, request a domain transfer — we'll move the domain to a registrar account in your name and you renew it yourself going forward (no exit fee, our contractual transfer-on-request commitment per Terms § 5). If you do neither before the renewal date, the domain will lapse and the site will go offline. We'll send reminders, but the final responsibility is yours. See the full refund policy for the details.

Won Lee — principal, designer, the person who'll answer your call. BrickWeb is a small senior studio, not a marketplace or a freelance front. The person who designs your site is the person who builds it, and the one who'll pick up the phone if something breaks two years from now.

Lee's Signs is our family sign shop in Norcross, Georgia — founded in 1989, still running today. SignCrunch is our SaaS tool for sign fabricators. BrickWeb Studio is the third venture. We built our own sites first; that experience is why we know what a working storefront site actually needs to do.

Yes — ask and we'll set it up. Lee's Signs (our family sign shop in Norcross, GA, est. 1989) and Nami Trading are both happy to talk about what working with us is like. You'll get an unvarnished read — nobody's on commission. We'd rather you hear it from someone who actually got the site than from a quote on our home page.

Because we build websites for brick-and-mortar shops — the kind of businesses you'd walk past on Main Street. The name keeps us honest: we're not chasing tech-startup work, we're not building app-of-the-week experiments. We make sturdy, well-crafted websites for businesses with a physical front door.

Yes — BrickWeb Studio is a trade name of SignCrunch Inc., a Georgia corporation. Registered office: 853 S. Peachtree St, Suite 106, Norcross, GA 30071. You can see our full legal entity on every page footer and on our Terms and Privacy pages.