If your business is stable and you are not publishing content every week, WordPress is more machine than you need. I build these as plain HTML, so there are no plugin updates, no security patches, and no hosting bill. You get Website Sidekick, a browser extension for changing your own text. Your only recurring cost is the domain, about twenty dollars a year.
Your site loads. The phone number is right. Nothing is on fire.
Here is what is actually happening. It looks like a template because it is one, and it makes you look smaller than you are. You pay for it every month whether anything changes or not. And when something does need to change, you either dig up a login you have used twice, or you email somebody and wait.
None of that is a crisis. It is just a maintenance tail on six pages of content that change twice a year, and somebody is paying for it. Usually you, and usually without a clear picture of what for.
You should not have to be proud of your work and quiet about your website.
Most of the businesses I talk to were handed a platform sized for somebody else's problem. Not because anybody was being dishonest, but because that is what everybody reaches for.
The site you are reading is the proof. weblytica.com is a static build. Plain HTML, no hosting bill, and Website Sidekick, the browser extension I wrote so I would never have to open an HTML file to fix a typo. I edit this site with the same tool I hand you.
Go check it. View the page source. Look at weblytica.com/llms.txt and the sitemap. Everything I am describing on this page is sitting on this page.
One of my values is outcome independence. I want to do what is best for you even when it is not best for me. If you tell me you want to blog, I will point you at WordPress before you pay me for this.
The point of all of this is that you stop calling me for every little thing. That is the design goal, not a side effect.
| Go static if | Go WordPress if |
|---|---|
| Your services do not change much | You are publishing regularly |
| You want to be found for what you already do | You want to compete on new content you keep publishing |
| Your marketing happens somewhere other than your site | Your website is the marketing engine |
| You want a presence that looks sharp and stays put | Somebody on your team is going to run the site |
| Nobody wants another monthly bill | You need the plugin ecosystem for something specific |
I build both. Static is $2,500. A WordPress build starts at $6,000, because it is a bigger tool with more in it. If you tell me on day one that you want to blog, I will recommend the $6,000 one even though this page is the one you landed on.
And if you go static now and change your mind in year two, that is a clean move. The content work carries over. We migrate you and build the blog then.
Send me your URL, we talk, and I build you a mockup. No contract, no charge. If you do not like it, you do not go forward.
We refine the look, I mock up the inner pages, and we settle the page count and the price. If you have an existing site, I do the first pass on rewriting your content.
You review and approve three pages a week. Twelve pages, five weeks, launched.
No hosting cost in year one and none after. Your only recurring bill is the domain renewal, about fifteen to twenty dollars a year, paid to your registrar.
A browser extension I built called Website Sidekick. Open it on the page, edit the text, hit save, and it publishes. It reads each page and builds the form to match that page, so you are not hunting through a dashboard for the field you want. Layout changes still come through me, and once I make one the new fields appear in Sidekick.
A lot of people do, and for a lot of sites that is right. The original reason to reach for a CMS was that building pages by hand was slow and expensive. That is much less true than it was three years ago, so the tradeoff moved. WordPress is still the answer when you are publishing. It is a lot of machine when you are not.
We move you to WordPress and build it there. Your content transfers cleanly, so you are not starting over. It is a jump in cost, and worth knowing now: static is $2,500 and a WordPress build starts at $6,000. If you already know you want to blog, say so and we will skip this and go straight to WordPress.
Any web developer. Plain HTML and CSS is the most portable thing on the internet. That is more than you can say for a site with forty plugins on it.
Really. The only recurring bill is your domain renewal, about fifteen to twenty dollars a year, and that goes to your registrar, not to me.
Pick a time and send the link to your current site. I will build a mockup before we talk, and I will tell you honestly whether you need this or WordPress. Either way you get an answer and a mockup, and it does not cost you anything.
No charge for the call or the mockup.
