This site and business is YOURS, your baby. And if you don’t love it by the end, then I didn’t do my job. I keep my clients very involved, will send them logo directions from the very beginning to get a sense right from the start what they are drawn to. Don’t be afraid to say no to things you don’t like, I want you to be involved and make sure your vision is realistically executed correctly and portrays you!

For websites, I’ll ask for your 5 favorite sites and during our phone call we can talk about features you like, features I see benefiting your site, and will decide what the main focus of your site will be. It is a very collaborative process and you can think of me as your #1 cheerleader from the get-go!

I prefer Venmo (@mckenziesuemakes), but also accept checks. If you are wanting to pay through PayPal there will be an additional 3% fee for any invoices over $100.

If you are out of the United States or do not own Venmo, I will provide my address for you to send a check.

I usually tell people 5-8 weeks for a website but it highly depends on how quickly you respond to emails and when you get certain logins or necessary content to me. I love a client who is on top of things so feel free to email to check up on things whenever you’d like! Please refrain from sending more than 2 emails a day, more than that I tend to miss certain things and becomes less organized.

I am a very type-A person, so my inbox is never ever full of unread messages. You can expect a response for sure within 48 hours, a little bit longer if you email near the weekend since I take weekends off.

You will most likely have my phone number and I always mention that it is my personal number so please refrain from texting or calling me. I will not answer and I rarely respond. I have had to become more strict on this over the years so I can leave my work at home and not have it follow me when I’m out of the house. If you are wanting to chat, send a quick email and I will respond fairly quickly.

I do not. Although I majored in Graphic Design, I found that coding came easily to me and found my niche in design + development. Over the years I have mastered my developing skills and can read/write: HTML, CSS, SASS, LESS, PHP, JS, LIQUID.

After over 4 years of being in the blog web industry, I have learned a thing or two about which hosting plans to trust and which are crap.  I always say when it comes to hosting is the analogy: “Dress for the job you want”. There’s probably a way better analogy than that ha. But what I mean is if you have or plan on having lots of traffic and have or plan to treat your blog like a business you’ve got to treat your hosting like one. If you buy cheap hosting you’ll have cheap service, that’s just that. WP Engine is more expensive but there are features that are free whereas other hosting companies make you pay more for. There are seriously so many benefits when it comes to WP Engine.

The benefits of WP Engine:

  1. SUPER easy migration, stress-free to get all your new content transferred with no problem. I will do it for you and you won’t have to contact customer service yourself.
  2. It includes a Staging site, which makes it so easy to add new features to the site in the future where you don’t want readers to see it. You won’t have to purchase a second hosting plan, duplicate the site, and then delete that second hosting plan when you’re done.
  3. The SSL certificate (the https:// instead of http://) is free and since it’s now required by Google you will have to have it. Most cheap hosting companies will make you pay for the SSL certificate each year. GoDaddy is $60 a year per site.
  4. You get free daily backups on both production and staging servers. This is another thing other companies make you pay if you want monthly or weekly or daily backups. WP Engine does a daily backup around 3:00 AM every day and if your site has a problem (like you update a plugin and it crashes your site) it takes 2 seconds to get back up. I couldn’t even find the price for GoDaddy’s but I know for sure they make you pay more. Sometimes they weren’t automatic and it would only backup if you went and did it yourself.
  5. If your site does crash, with other hosting companies there is nothing I can do except call customer service (which I usually have you do). With WP Engine if your site crashes, I can get it up myself in 5 minutes flat.
  6. The customer service is SPECTACULAR (I’m seriously not kidding, WP Engine is so quick, they actually know what they’re talking about, and it’s always available). Companies like GoDaddy you usually have to search through thousands of annoying forums that never really give you your answer and chat is so difficult to find on the site and when you finally do and it’s open the chat guy usually is snarky and has no idea what he’s talking about. SO frustrating.
  7. Everything takes so much longer, one of my clients is adament about using GoDaddy/cheap hosting and we have been stuck for 2 months trying to clone the site onto a beta domain because their site is horrible user experience, the chat guys never actually answer our questions, and after we did get it up it was so incredibly slow for no reason that she is switching companies this weekend.

You can read more on a blog post here. One of my clients, Mint Arrow, raves about it in this post as well. If you pay annually you get a discounted price aka 2 months free. And yes the links in that blog post and the ones in my emails are affiliate links but I honestly don’t care if you use them, I will recommend it every time! Now don’t get me wrong, GoDaddy is great for domains and what I recommend for purchasing your domains. That is what GoDaddy was created and meant to be: a domain registar, and hosting is secondary in the their company. WP Engine is specifically for WordPress sites and they do it well.

In the end, this is your blog and business so you have the final decision of what hosting you want to use! You will need to make sure there is a staging/duplicate server for me to be able to work on the site without having to work on it live. I will not do this for you since most of the time they need your credit card information. So clients who wanted to stick with a cheap hosting had to purchase a duplicate hosting plan during the meantime which is usually always a yearly thing although we really only need it for 2ish months. But then I can get started from there.

During our first call we will chat about your branding, what you envision, what your focuses are, and how you stand out from your competitors.

I also usually have my clients share a secret Pinterest board so I can get more of a sense of what you love and are drawn to! I will use this to create an inspiration moodboard and then send around 2-3 directions for you to help decide which direction is best to take. I always take lots of feedback from my clients, I want to make sure the branding and logo is something that you love and is truly you!

I offer a number of packages:

  • Branding Package (starting at $2,000)
  • Custom Blog/Website (starting at $10,000)
  • Branding & Custom Blog/Website (both packages at a discounted price)
  • Newsletter Strategy Package (starting at $500)
  • SEO Package (starting at $500)

The prices are dependent for each person and circumstance but this can give you a starting point.

Your site is launched and everything is working great! But the internet is always changing and you see something super cool on another site you would love to implement on your own. You can hire me to help you out, it is $70 an hour invoiced monthly. A lot of clients just need a small question answered or little additions here or there which usually only take me 5-10 minutes each time. I will always let you know if it will end up taking me more than 2 hours for a specific request.

I am all about teaching my clients how to fish and not just giving them their fish. If you are a blog, it would make most sense for you to add your own content in since you are the writer! I will teach you how to use the platform and you can ask me questions along the way as you’re learning.

Let’s say you have a Portfolio page and you are too busy to add them all in. I am happy to help! Everything will need to be clearly labeled in a Dropbox folder so that there is less chance of miscommunication. Have separate folders for separate projects, rename them so they show up in the correct order (use numbers), and once I’ve added them in we can make sure they are all correct. I will resize these initial images for you and teach you how to resize your images after your site launches and you want to add another project to your portfolio.

Absolutely! Any type of new platform or company you sign up for (WordPress, MailChimp, Shopstyle, RewardStyle, etc.) I will be available to give you a video tutorial. For WordPress and MailChimp, what I usually do is either have a video chat with you on Zoom or create your own video tutorial and send via Dropbox. Then you can reference it again in the future or have available for new assistants. For companies like Shopstyle or Rewardstyle I will have a link to a blog post that explains everything you need to know to get started/get something that is commonly used for my sites.

I am always available to answer any questions and help you learn whatever it is you need to do your business! I want all my clients to learn how to fish and not just give you the fish 😉

*All tutorials are included in the package. If you already know how to work these companies/sites, you do not get a discounted price on the package. Take advantage and ask me about something you don’t know that you’d like to learn more about, like SEO!

The Custom Site Package includes an automatic RSS MailChimp template designed just for you and can include a preview of your Instagram and related/previous posts. You will decide if you want your newsletter to go out daily (the day of a published blog post) or once a week (every Friday at 5 a roundup of what they missed that week). You will choose the exact time it will send and please be sure to publish any blog posts you want included in the newsletter 3 hours before it sends to ensure the XML updates and MailChimp grabs it.

If you are really wanting to boost your email list and give your readers multiple options to receive emails from you, there is a separate Newsletter Strategy Package you can purchase. It will include all newsletter templates, manual and automatic, and a custom sign up form with checkbox options for your readers.

The Branding package includes a moodboard, logo, secondary and other variations, monogram and/or icons, color palette, and a branding guide PDF that will explain the color hex codes and what fonts we use for future reference.

I love a client who is their own advocate. If you need a business card let me know and it will be included. If you need a Facebook cover photo or Instagram stories cover photos I will make one. You have to let me know those specifications during the process since 24 hours after the site launches all packages close. If you decide a few months down the road you need something designed, like a media kit, it will be $70 an hour invoiced monthly.

Any large type of design project like creating an e-book is separate from the Branding Package and will be the same rate.

If you have a specific deadline in mind but my schedule is booked, I do occasionally offer rush rates depending on the circumstance. It is usually between an additional  25%-35% of the package price, depending on how close the deadline is and how booked I am. This additional percentage price would ensure that we launch no later than the agreed upon date.

In the first few years I started my business, I would buy WordPress themes and customize them for my clients to fit their branding and add the features we discussed. The internet is always changing and even 6 months later when that client would ask for something they wanted to add it would be terribly difficult to do. Those themes were built to do what they do and not much more. So after I mastered my development skills I decided to only offer custom sites.

This ensures that the site is made just for you and your business’s strategy and focuses! And when the internet does something new and you want to implement a new feature, I won’t have to tell you no and the opportunities are limitless for growth!

Yes, we will transfer you to WordPress. Usually the transfer process is smooth but sometimes RS widgets and a few images don’t transfer well and you may have to go through and add those back in.

The transfer is included in the package price, let me know in our initial email because we will want to start that process first thing to ensure there’s time for any bumps along the road.

If you are worried about any links breaking, we will do a sweep of the site and add redirections so Pinterest links and bookmarks still go to the right place. There is no need to stay on Blogspot just because you’ve been using it for so long! WordPress is built for blogs and the sky is the limit to what we can do for you!

Always buy your domain as soon as you know which one it is. I recommend GoDaddy or Name.com. If you have a blog name that could easily be misspelled I would purchase it as well, I mean it’s only ~$12 a year!

As for hosting, hold off until we chat because depending on the type of site you need, the hosting may change. The majority of the time it is WP Engine for WordPress but if you’re selling products, Shopify would be your hosting.