Kansas City web development, from one person you can text

What a website actually costs here

Last August I went through 205 Midwest web design companies to see how many would tell you a price before putting you on a sales call. 48 of them published a dollar figure anywhere on the site, and only 44 published one for actually building you something. Among those 44, the median was $1,500, the middle half landed between $750 and $3,500, and the full range ran from $289 to $10,000.

Mine is $750 once, or $100 a month for 12 months if that's easier on the books, and care and hosting afterward runs $49, $89 or $179 depending on how closely you want it watched. Local SEO is $250, $500 or $1,000 a month, and plenty of people don't need it at all.

That's the list. It doesn't move because you called from a 913 number instead of an 816 one, and it doesn't move because your last quote was higher.

What most Kansas City sites actually measure

In July I ran Google’s own throttled mobile test against 105 Kansas City small-business sites. Not a sample picked to look bad — real ones, measured the way Google measures them.

The median performance score came back 55 out of 100, and the median site needed 10 seconds to put its main content on the screen — only 7.6% of them scored 90 or better.

Ten seconds. That's somebody sitting in a truck deciding whether to call you.

I'm not posting it to scare anybody into a rebuild. Speed's usually the cheapest thing on the list to fix, and most shops here will hand you an invoice without ever having measured it.

Work I have done inside this metro

Four of my case studies are businesses in this metro, not stock photos of businesses in this metro. Xtreme Pressure Washing, American Standard Garage Door and Many Parts, One Body are all in Blue Springs, and Workhorse Court Reporting Services is up in Independence — eight pages, hand-coded, self-hosted fonts, and a pricing calculator I wrote in 252 lines of plain JavaScript with nothing else sitting behind it.

Each one has a write-up with the build decisions and the measurements in it. Go and check them rather than take my word for it:

Xtreme Pressure Washing, American Standard Garage Door, Many Parts, One Body, Workhorse Court Reporting Services.

Web design or web development?

People here search for one and usually mean the other. Design is what it looks like. Development is what it does — the quote form that actually routes somewhere, the booking, the calculator, the part that talks to Stripe.

I do both, because on a job this size splitting them only adds a person to your invoice. If your site needs to do something rather than just sit there, that's development, and that's most of what I build.

Cities in the Kansas City, MO-KS Metro Area