The math on a $299 website is worth a minute of anyone’s time. Say the designer wants to earn a modest $30 an hour, which is less than plenty of plumbers’ apprentices make around Towson. That buys roughly ten hours of work. Ten hours to answer the sales inquiry, collect…

Somebody always has a nephew. That’s how the website conversation kicks off at most small-business mixers, the ones with lukewarm coffee and name tags that won’t stay stuck. The nephew built a site over Memorial Day weekend. Cost two hundred bucks and a crab feast. Works great, supposedly, although nobody…

Three quotes land in a Bowie contractor’s inbox in the same week. $2,800. $3,100. $11,000. The big one is easy to set aside. The other two are the real puzzle, because on paper they look nearly identical: same number of pages, same “mobile responsive” promise, same smiling stock photo on…

Getting a good website without draining the bank account mostly comes down to one habit: paying for the things customers will actually touch, and politely skipping the rest. Fast pages, clear menus, a phone number that dials when tapped. Those bring in money. Spinning logos and fancy scrolling effects mostly…