Everything you might ask.

It starts with a free 20–30 minute call (phone, video or in person around Maryland) where we learn what your business does, who your customers are and what you want them to do when they find you online, like call, visit, book or order. We then send a written quote with the exact package, price and timeline. Once you accept the agreement and pay the 50% deposit, we design and build your site, share a private preview link, collect your feedback and make the revisions included in your package. When you approve it, we launch it on your domain. Starter sites are usually ready in about a week; Custom sites take two to three weeks, mostly depending on how quickly we get your photos and details.

Your business name, address, phone number, hours and a short description of what you offer are enough to begin. If you have a logo, photos of your work, storefront, team or products, and any reviews you’re proud of, send those too. Don’t worry if your photos aren’t perfect or you don’t know what to write. We write the website text for you based on our conversation, and we’ll suggest simple ways to take good photos with a phone. You approve every word before anything goes live.

Not at all; most of our clients aren’t, and that’s exactly why we exist. We handle everything technical: the design, building, domain setup, hosting, security, updates and backups. You never need to log in to a server or learn a website builder. If you’re on a care plan, the only things you’ll ever touch are a simple portal where you can change your hours or post an announcement, and a form to ask us for anything else. We’ll walk you through it in person or on a call.

We focus on local and small businesses whose customers find them on Google and their phones: restaurants, cafés and food trucks, shops and boutiques, barbers, salons and beauty studios, auto repair, cleaning, landscaping and other home services, contractors, event and rental companies, churches and community organizations, consultants and professional services. If people search for you, call you, or need directions to you, a fast, clear website with your phone number and hours one tap away will help.

Yes. We’re based in Maryland and love meeting local clients in person, but everything we do also works remotely: calls, video meetings, email and the client portal. We’ve designed our process so you can be anywhere in the United States.

Yes. We can do the whole project in Amharic, from the first call to explaining your invoice, and we can build your website in Amharic, English, or both with a language switch. Many of our community’s customers search in English but feel more at home reading Amharic, so a bilingual site can be a real advantage. Our legal documents are in English, but we’re always happy to walk you through them in Amharic.

Starter is for businesses that want a professional website without a monthly bill. We build a polished one-page site with up to five sections on our proven layout system, styled with your logo, colors, photos and words. When it’s done, we hand it over: you get the complete code, a simple guide, free hosting set up in your own name, and 30 days of free fixes. Custom is for businesses that want something designed from scratch and looked after every month: up to five pages, two rounds of revisions, signature touches like video and galleries, and a care plan that includes hosting, updates, backups, a customer insights dashboard and edits.

Because it’s simpler, and we’re honest about that. Starter uses our own tested layout system instead of a design built from a blank page, it’s one page instead of several, it includes one round of revisions instead of two, and there’s no ongoing care from us after the free fix period. That saves us time, and we pass the savings on to you. The quality of the code, speed and accessibility is exactly the same as our Custom work.

It’s yours to run. The site lives on a free hosting account in your own name (we use reputable providers that allow business sites at no cost), and your domain points to it. For 30 days we fix any problems with our work for free. After that, you have three options: keep it as is and pay us nothing; add Basic Hosting for $19/month and we’ll keep it online, secure and updated; or add any care plan for the full experience, including insights and edits. If you just need a change now and then, we’ll do it at $75/hour, always quoted before we start.

Basic Hosting is for Starter sites. We host the site on our professional setup, keep the security certificate (the padlock) valid, apply security updates and monitor that it stays online. That’s deliberately all it does: it doesn’t include edits, the customer insights dashboard, the content editor or monthly reports. Changes are $75/hour. You can move up to a full care plan at any time.

Yes, and you won’t lose what you paid. If you upgrade to a Custom build within 6 months of your Starter launch, we credit the full $600 toward it, so you only pay the difference. You can also add a care plan to a Starter site at any time without upgrading the design.

Essential ($59/month) keeps your site fast, secure, backed up and online, includes the customer insights dashboard and 1 small edit / month. Growth ($99/month), our most popular plan, adds 3 edits / month, the self-serve content editor, a monthly performance report and Google Business Profile updates. Premium ($249/month) is for businesses actively growing: unlimited small edits, a new page or section every quarter, search tune-ups, same-day changes and a quarterly strategy call. Pay yearly on any plan and get two months free.

A small edit is a change that takes us under about 30 minutes: updating text, prices or a menu item, swapping or adding a few photos, changing a phone number or link, adding a new review, or tweaking a button. Bigger work, like a new page, a new section, a redesign or connecting a new tool, isn’t a small edit; we’ll quote it in writing first (Premium includes a new page or section each quarter). Unused edits don’t roll over to the next month.

No. You pay the build fee, the monthly plan you choose (if any), and your domain name at our cost, usually about $10–20 per year. Sales tax is added only if Maryland law requires it, and it’s shown on your invoice before you pay. Anything outside your package is quoted in writing before any work starts, so you’ll never get a surprise bill.

Never. Some website platforms charge a percentage of your sales or require you to use their payment system. We don’t. If your site takes payments, bookings or orders, the money goes straight to your own account with the payment provider, and the only fee you pay is that provider’s standard processing fee.

A website isn’t a brochure you print once. It lives on a server that has to be paid for, kept secure and kept online; the software underneath needs regular security updates; backups protect you if something goes wrong; and businesses change hours, prices and photos all the time. A care plan bundles all of that with a person who knows your site, for a predictable monthly price. If you’d rather handle it yourself, that’s exactly what Starter is for.

You pay securely online through Stripe, one of the world’s largest payment companies, by card or bank transfer (ACH). Your card details go directly to Stripe; we never see or store your full card number. You’ll get an emailed receipt for every payment and can download all your invoices from the client portal.

Half when you accept the agreement, which reserves your spot and starts the design, and half when the website launches. If you choose a care plan or Basic Hosting, its first payment is charged on launch day, and then every month (or year) after that.

If you change your mind before we start designing, we refund the deposit in full. Once design work has begun, the deposit pays for the time already spent and isn’t refundable. We’ll always tell you when design work is starting.

Since July 2025, Maryland taxes some IT, hosting and software services. Where tax applies to what you buy from us, it’s added to your invoice and shown clearly before you pay. If you’re tax-exempt, send us your exemption certificate and we’ll apply it.

Yes. Once the build fee is paid in full, the design and content made for your business belong to you, and the words, photos and logo you gave us were always yours. We keep ownership only of our general tools and building blocks, and you get a permanent license to use those as part of your site, even if you leave us. This is in writing in our agreement, not just a marketing line.

You do. We register new domains in your name, so you are the legal owner on record, and we take care of the technical setup and renewals while you’re a client. If you already own a domain, you keep it exactly where it is; we only change the settings that point it to your new website. Your domain is your business’s address online. It should never belong to your web designer.

You can leave at any time; on a care plan, cancel online and service ends at the end of your current billing period. We give you a complete copy of your website files and content at no charge, help you move your domain or hosting wherever you like, and keep your files for 90 days afterward just in case. We’d rather earn your business every month than trap you.

Website builders are a great fit if you enjoy doing it yourself. With most of them, you rent a template shared by thousands of other businesses, spend your own evenings building and updating it, and can’t take the site with you if you leave. With us, real people design the site around your business, build it, and either hand it over to you or keep it running for you. There’s no cut of your sales, the stats are privacy-friendly, and you own what we make. You also get someone who knows your business by name.

Yes, for most small businesses. We connect secure checkout, booking or ordering from trusted providers like Stripe or Square for a handful to a few dozen products, gift cards, deposits or appointments. If you need a large online store with hundreds of products, inventory tracking and shipping rules, we’ll tell you honestly that a dedicated store platform may be the better fit, and we can still build your main website around it.

Custom sites are designed from scratch for your business, so no one else will have yours. Starter sites use our own layout system, the same proven structure, then styled with your colors, fonts, photos and words, so they look professional and personal, but the underlying structure is shared. If being one-of-a-kind matters to you, choose Custom.

Starter includes 1 round of revisions and Custom includes 2. A round means you review the whole site and send us one list of changes, and we make them all. Most clients are happy within the included rounds. If you need more, we’ll quote the extra time before doing it.

On a care plan, yes. Your client portal lets you change your opening hours, post an announcement banner (for holidays, specials or new arrivals) and update your contact details anytime, and the change shows on your site right away. For anything bigger, like new photos, pages or design changes, send a request from the portal and we handle it. Starter clients receive the full code, so a developer can change anything, or we can do it hourly.

On Essential and Growth, most small edits are done within two business days. Growth requests get priority, and Premium includes same-day changes for requests sent before noon on business days. We’ll always tell you when your request is done.

We set up the search basics on every site: clear page titles and descriptions, your business details in the format Google reads, a map, fast loading and a phone-friendly layout, all of which Google rewards. The biggest boost for most local businesses is a complete Google Business Profile with photos and reviews, which we help with on Growth and Premium. What we won’t do is promise you the #1 spot. Nobody honest can, and anyone who guarantees rankings should make you nervous.

Yes, it’s built for phones first. For most local businesses, the majority of visitors are on a phone, so we design for a thumb first and then make it beautiful on tablets and computers too. Your phone number, directions and hours are always one tap away.

Yes. We build to WCAG 2.2 Level AA, the accessibility standard courts and regulators use, so people who use screen readers, keyboards, voice control or magnification can use your site. Website accessibility lawsuits against small businesses are common, so this protects you as well as your customers. We test every site with real assistive technology before it launches.

Every site has HTTPS (the padlock), modern hosting with built-in protection against attacks, and no outdated plugins, which is the most common way small-business sites get hacked. On a care plan we also apply security updates, keep daily backups and monitor that your site is online. Starter sites handed over to you start out just as secure; keeping them updated afterward is up to you, or you can add Basic Hosting.

The numbers that actually matter to a small business. How many people visited, and more importantly how many of them called you, asked for directions, sent a message or emailed. You’ll also see where visitors came from (Google, Google Maps, Instagram and so on), which pages they looked at, what devices they used, which towns they’re in, your busiest days and hours, and how fast your site loads. We add plain-English notes like “Calls are up 18% this month, mostly from Google Maps.” The dashboard is included with every care plan.

Each day we create a temporary, scrambled code from a visitor’s connection and browser, mixed with a secret that’s thrown away every 24 hours. That lets us count a person once per day without storing their IP address, without cookies and without being able to recognize them tomorrow or on another website. It’s the same privacy-first approach used by tools like Plausible and Fathom.

No tracking cookies, no advertising pixels and no selling of data, on our site or yours. That means your website doesn’t need an annoying cookie banner. If you ever want to add your own advertising tools, like a Facebook or Google ads pixel, we’ll set them up properly with the consent notice the law requires.

Never. Your website is your space. We don’t place ads, sponsored links or our own logo on client sites beyond an optional small credit in the footer, which you can ask us to remove.

Yes. Each business can only see its own account, data is encrypted, and only the two of us at Nilewright can access client information, and only to serve you. We never sell or share it. Our Privacy Policy explains exactly what we collect and why.

Yes, anytime, online in your client portal in a couple of clicks, or by emailing us. There are no cancellation fees and no long-term contract. Your plan stays active until the end of the period you’ve already paid for, and then it stops renewing.

Cards expire and payments fail; it happens. We retry automatically and send a friendly reminder on day 3, then a final notice on day 7 that tells you the exact date your site would be paused. If it’s still unpaid on day 14, the site shows a neutral “temporarily unavailable” page, which never mentions payment to your customers. Nothing is ever deleted, and the site comes back as soon as the balance is paid.

Yes. You can move up or down between plans whenever you like by sending a request in the portal; the new price applies from your next billing period. Starter clients can add Basic Hosting or a care plan at any time.

Yes. Pay for a year upfront on any plan and you get two months free. We email you a reminder before each yearly renewal so it never catches you by surprise.

Through the requests page in your client portal, or by email at hello@nilewright.com. We reply within one business day, usually much sooner, in English or Amharic. Clients on Growth and Premium get priority.