Frequently asked questions

Cibbster Designs builds start at $4,500 for a five-to-eight page site for a local service business. The figure rises with page count, custom functionality, integrations and whether you need content written — there is no published ceiling because a large or complex site genuinely can cost a multiple of the starting figure. You get a fixed written quote after discovery, and once it is written it does not move unless you change the scope.

No. That figure describes a five-to-eight page business site, and it is a starting price, not a minimum we enforce. A single-page site or a landing page — one page, hand-coded, accessible, with a working contact form and the same SEO and schema foundation — starts at $1,800. If your project is smaller than the published figures, say so rather than assuming you are priced out; small jobs get quoted as small jobs.

Four to eight weeks for a standard business site. The largest variable is how quickly content, photos and feedback come back from your side — projects that stall almost always stall on content, not code.

Only when a client genuinely needs it. WordPress is a good fit if non-technical staff will publish content weekly. For a brochure or lead-generation site, a hand-coded build is faster, cheaper to maintain and has far less security surface. We recommend based on your situation rather than defaulting to one tool.

Yes, if you want to. We can add a lightweight content management system for the sections that actually change — services, staff, projects, blog posts — while leaving the structural code alone.

If you commissioned the build as its own project and paid for it, yes — the custom code, the design and the content transfer to you on final payment, and nothing stops you moving the site elsewhere. If the site was instead provided as part of an ongoing plan, we retain it and you hold a licence to use it for as long as that plan runs. Your domain, your content and your data are yours in either case. We tell you which arrangement you are in before you sign, not afterwards.

Anything beyond a brochure website where users log in, submit structured data, or the software makes decisions. Common examples are customer portals, job scheduling systems, instant quote calculators, inspection checklists and internal reporting dashboards.

Projects start at $12,000. Cost is driven almost entirely by the number of distinct user roles and workflows, not by page count, so there is no honest ceiling to publish — a multi-role platform can run several times the starting figure. We scope in phases so you can launch a useful version one and expand from revenue rather than paying for everything up front, and each phase is quoted before it begins.

Often, over a three-to-five year horizon. If you are paying $600 a month across several tools that only partly fit, a $15,000 custom build pays for itself in roughly two years and then costs only hosting. If you pay $50 a month for one tool that fits well, keep it — we will tell you that.

You do, where the application was commissioned and paid for as its own project — which is how these engagements are normally structured. On final payment we deliver the full source repository and deployment documentation, and you are free to hire any developer to continue the work. Our reusable framework and components come with it under a perpetual licence rather than as a transfer, so you can keep using and modifying them in your application but not resell them on their own. Anything built under an ongoing plan rather than commissioned outright stays ours and is licensed for the term.

Yes. We regularly inherit half-finished or abandoned codebases. The first step is a paid technical audit so you get an honest assessment of whether the existing code is worth continuing or cheaper to replace.

Use WordPress if you publish frequently, need a large plugin ecosystem, or will hire staff who already know it. Use a custom CMS if you update a handful of sections occasionally and want a site with almost no maintenance burden or attack surface. Roughly two thirds of our small-business clients are better served by a custom CMS.

WordPress core is reasonably secure and patched quickly. The risk is almost entirely in plugins and themes — abandoned code with known vulnerabilities is the single most common way small-business sites get compromised. A disciplined install with few plugins and managed updates is fine; the typical install is not.

Yes. We audit the plugin stack, remove what is unused, replace what is abandoned, patch what is outdated, fix the performance damage and put a managed update process in place. This is usually a fraction of the cost of a rebuild.

Not if it is built correctly. Our custom CMS builds render cached static output, so the public site is as fast as a hand-coded page. Slow CMS sites are almost always slow because of plugin bloat and unoptimised images, not because of content management itself.

Local SEO improvements — Google Business Profile, technical fixes, schema — often show movement in four to eight weeks. Competitive organic rankings for commercial terms usually take four to six months of consistent work. Anyone promising page one in thirty days is either targeting terms nobody searches or is about to do something that gets you penalised.

Our local SEO retainers start at $750 per month, after a one-time $1,500 foundation engagement covering the technical audit, the fixes it turns up and baseline measurement. A standalone technical audit without a retainer is also $1,500. We do not require a twelve-month contract — the foundation fee exists so that the heavily front-loaded first month is paid for directly rather than recovered by locking you in.

Local SEO targets searches with geographic intent — "roof repair near me", "web designer Lapeer MI" — and is heavily influenced by your Google Business Profile, proximity to the searcher, review volume and NAP consistency. Regular organic SEO competes nationally and is driven more by content depth and backlinks. Local service businesses should invest in local SEO first, because it converts far better.

Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of getting your business cited in AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews. It overlaps heavily with good SEO but rewards different things: unambiguous factual statements, clear entity definitions, structured data, direct answers to real questions, and content that reads as authoritative to a model summarising a topic. It is becoming a meaningful traffic source and it is easier to win now than it will be in two years.

Not necessarily. For most local service businesses, well-built service and location pages outrank a blog every time. Blogging helps when you are competing for informational searches or building topical authority in a competitive market. We would rather build you eight excellent service pages than forty thin blog posts.

No, and neither can anyone else honestly. Google does not sell or guarantee positions. What we guarantee is the work: a documented audit, a fix list actually implemented, and monthly reporting you can verify independently in your own Google Search Console and Analytics accounts.

Ad platforms count conversions against the click that caused them and use their own attribution window; GA4 attributes across all channels. Ad platforms also have an incentive to claim credit. Expect discrepancies of 10-30% as normal, and treat GA4 as the tie-breaker because it is the only source seeing every channel at once.

It depends where your visitors are. There is no single federal law, but state privacy laws — California, Colorado, Virginia, Texas and a growing list — impose obligations, and Google requires Consent Mode for EU traffic. For most Michigan businesses serving local customers, a clear privacy policy and a simple consent banner is proportionate and low cost.

Only if it is configured carelessly. Using dynamic number insertion for paid traffic while keeping your real business number visible to search engines and in your Google Business Profile preserves NAP consistency. Replacing your number everywhere without care does cause problems — which is exactly why we configure it deliberately.

Yes. Analytics work does not require us to have built the site. We only need access to the site code or tag manager, the domain DNS for verification, and your Google accounts.

US courts have overwhelmingly held that the ADA applies to the websites of businesses open to the public, and in 2024 the Department of Justice issued a rule explicitly adopting WCAG 2.1 AA for state and local government websites. For private businesses there is still no single codified technical standard, which is precisely why plaintiffs and courts use WCAG as the benchmark. Conforming to WCAG 2.2 AA is the practical definition of compliance.

No. Overlay tools — the floating accessibility icon that claims one-line compliance — have been named in hundreds of lawsuits against sites that had them installed, and hundreds of accessibility professionals have signed a public statement against them. They cannot fix underlying markup problems, and they sometimes break assistive technology that was working. Real compliance requires fixing the code.

Audits start at $2,500 for a small brochure site of up to roughly ten unique templates. Remediation is quoted separately once we know what we found, because a well-built site may need six hours of work and a badly built one may need sixty.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are the international standard for web accessibility, published by the W3C. Version 2.2 is current, and Level AA is the conformance level regulations and courts reference. It covers roughly fifty testable success criteria across four principles: content must be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust.

Yes, and quickly. The first step is an audit establishing exactly what fails, which tells your attorney what is actually at stake. Documented remediation work in progress materially strengthens your position. We can usually start an audit within a week.

Yes, meaningfully. Alt text, semantic headings, descriptive link text, clean landmark structure and captions are simultaneously accessibility requirements and things search engines and AI models use to understand a page. Accessible sites are easier for machines to read, which is the entire job of SEO.

Desktop Outlook renders HTML using the Microsoft Word engine, which ignores much of modern CSS — flexbox, grid, most positioning and many background properties. Emails that look right in Outlook are built with nested tables and inline styles, which is why email is hand-coded rather than exported from a web design tool.

The most common cause by far is missing or misconfigured email authentication. If your domain has no SPF, DKIM and DMARC records, Google and Yahoo now actively reject or junk bulk mail from it — their 2024 sender requirements made this mandatory rather than advisory. Content and list quality matter too, but authentication is the gate.

For most local service businesses, once a month is the floor for staying remembered and roughly the ceiling before annoyance. Transactional and triggered messages — quote follow-ups, appointment reminders, review requests — sit outside that cadence and almost always outperform newsletters.

Not really. Apple Mail Privacy Protection pre-loads tracking pixels, which inflates opens for a large share of your list. Click-through rate, replies and actual conversions are the metrics worth optimising now.

Our managed plans start at $149 per month and include hosting, backups, monitoring, SSL, security patching, hardening and included support time — the maintenance work that commodity hosting leaves to you, which on its own is commonly billed at $50 to $200 per month. Commodity shared hosting is cheaper on paper, but it excludes everything after the word "hosting" — when a plugin update breaks your site on a $4 plan, fixing it is your problem.

Monitoring alerts us within a minute and we begin investigating immediately. Most incidents — a failed service, an expired certificate, a bad deploy — are resolved before a customer notices. If the failure is catastrophic we restore from the most recent verified backup.

Yes, after a short technical review. We check the codebase for anything that would make it unsafe or unmaintainable to host. If we find serious problems we will tell you honestly before taking it on rather than inheriting somebody else's emergency.

You can leave the hosting at any time, with no exit fee. If you own the site — a build you commissioned and paid for as its own project — you take it with you and we help your new host with the migration. If the site was provided under a plan rather than bought outright, the site itself stays with us, but we still export your content, images and database so that nothing you supplied is lost. Hosting should be earned monthly, not enforced by making departure painful.

Yes. Managed plans carry a 99.9% uptime target measured by third-party monitoring, and defined response windows by severity. The full terms are in the service agreement.