About
I’m one person, in Edmonton, who builds websites.
That sentence is the entire org chart. Here’s the rest of it, including the parts most people in this business would rather not put on a website.
Plain Page exists because I was the client first.
I’ve sat through the agency meetings. The quote comes back at several thousand dollars and a three-month timeline, for what is honestly five pages of text and some photos. The proposal has a section called “brand discovery.” Somebody asks you about your “digital ecosystem.” You walk out feeling slightly stupid for not following half of it — which, I’d like to say plainly, you shouldn’t. The work was never that complicated. The price just needed it to sound that way.
So I did what most people do next and signed up for a website builder. I lost more evenings than I care to admit dragging boxes around a screen, fighting a template that wanted my business to be a different shape than it is. I got it about seventy percent finished. It sat there, seventy percent finished, for a long time. If you’ve been through this, you know the particular feeling of opening that tab again on a Sunday night.
Eventually I threw in the towel on both routes and learned to build the thing properly myself, from the ground up. That turned out to be the part worth doing — because once you can actually build one, you can see exactly how much of that original quote was the work, and how much was the office, the account manager and the discovery workshop.
For a small business that needs five good pages, it isn’t much. Which leaves an obvious gap in the middle: a proper, well-built, small website at a price that matches the size of the job. That’s the only thing I do, and I price it like someone who remembers being quoted the other number.
How I work
Four things that are true about hiring me.
This is a part-time business
I’m telling you that up front rather than letting you find out. It has one real downside — I have limited build slots, and if I’m booked you’ll wait. It has two real upsides: my overhead is nearly zero, which is why the price is $800, and I take one project at a time, so your two weeks are actually yours.
You get me on the phone
Not a ticket system, not an account manager, not a chatbot. If you call during reasonable hours you’ll usually get me, and if you don’t you’ll get a call back the same day. This is the actual difference between me and an agency, and it’s worth more than it sounds.
I’ll tell you when to hire someone else
If you need an online store, a booking system, or customer logins, I don’t build those and I’m not going to take your deposit and figure it out as I go. I’ll tell you on the first call and, where I can, point you somewhere better. Turning down work I can’t do properly is not a hard decision.
Everything ends up in your name
Your domain, registered by you. Your Cloudflare account, with me added as a member you can remove in two clicks. Your form service. If you decide next year that you never want to speak to me again, nothing breaks and nothing is held hostage. That’s not generosity — it’s just how it ought to work.
Being straight with you
Yes, I use AI tools.
A lot of developers use them right now and quietly don’t mention it. I’d rather just say so, because you’re going to wonder how the price is $800.
AI tooling is part of how I build. It handles the slow, repetitive parts — first drafts of layout code, boilerplate, the fiddly cross-browser details — and compresses days of typing into hours. That efficiency is a genuine part of why I can charge a fifth of what an agency does and still do the work properly.
Here’s what it doesn’t do. It doesn’t sit on the first call and work out that what you actually need is your phone number bigger and your service area clearer. It doesn’t open your site on three real phones to check the form. It doesn’t notice that the photo you sent of your best job is the one that should be at the top. And it does not answer when you call in March because your hours changed.
Every line of what I hand you is reviewed and tested by me, and I’m accountable for all of it. You’re hiring judgement and responsibility. The tools are how the typing gets done faster.
The same honesty applies to experience: I’m newer at running this as a business than an agency with fifteen years behind it. What I’ll trade you for that is a fixed price, a short timeline, work you can inspect before you pay the balance, and three finished example sites you can pick apart right now.
What I think
A few opinions about small business websites
- Most of your visitors are on a phone, in a hurry, on bad signal. That single fact should decide almost every design choice, and usually decides none of them.
- Your phone number is the most important element on the page. Not the hero image. Not the animation. The number.
- Nobody reads a mission statement. They want to know what you do, whether you cover their area, roughly what it costs, and whether you seem legitimate.
- A slow website is a broken website. If it takes four seconds to load on a phone, a good portion of your visitors are already gone.
- You should own your website. Renting your business’s front door from a platform, forever, at $30 a month, is a worse deal than it looks.
- Five good pages beat twenty neglected ones. Every extra page is another thing to keep true.
Next step
Twenty minutes on the phone.
No pitch, no obligation. Tell me what your business does and I’ll tell you straight whether I’m the right person for it.