Boundaries
Where your build ends, and what happens next
Every website quote you will ever get is a promise about the future, and nobody can make one without leaving something out. This is the part most of them leave out, put in front of you before you pay rather than after something goes wrong.
01
What the platforms decide, and what I do about it
- Where you rank, and whether an AI answer cites you
- Search engines and AI assistants decide for themselves what to crawl, index, rank, summarise or quote. My job is to clear every technical reason to leave you out and make your facts extractable and true, then submit you and confirm you were indexed. What those companies do next belongs to them.
- How many leads, calls or sales arrive
- A site can be fast, clear and correct and still go quiet because the offer is wrong or nobody has heard of you yet. If the website is the wrong thing to spend your money on this quarter, you hear that in the Sprint, before you spend it.
- Whether a platform approves you
- Google verification, Meta ad account approval, merchant verification and app review are their decisions on their timetable. I prepare the submission so it goes in properly the first time.
- Getting a lost account back
- Recovering a domain, a page or an account is a process the platform runs on its own terms, and it often takes weeks. I will help you work through it, as a paid and uncertain effort rather than an inclusion.
02
Real work, quoted as its own job
- Legal, tax, privacy and insurance advice
- I will tell you which decisions need an adviser and write a brief they can work from in an hour instead of three. The documents and the advice come from them.
- Photography, filming and original illustration
- Its own brief and its own quote. Images you already hold and have the rights to are placed inside the build at no extra cost.
- Original brand identity and naming
- Logo and identity work is a separate job with its own rounds. A build applies the logo you already hold.
- Advertising spend and campaign management
- The ad account and the spend are yours. Management is a monthly service with its own scope.
- Ongoing content production
- Writing is bought by the piece or inside a care plan, with a defined output each time. Unbounded is how both sides end up unhappy.
03
The jobs where somebody else is the right call
- Customer portals, logins and stored customer records
- That is an application rather than a website: different risk, different architecture, different price. You get told straight away and pointed at somebody who builds them.
- Sensitive or regulated intake
- Health, identity and financial records need a data architecture the standard product does not carry, and it is more than adding a field to a form.
- A build where the accounts stay with me
- An account in my name makes your site a dependency rather than an asset. It is the one thing here that is not negotiable, and it is the reason the rest of this works.
- A guarantee nobody can substantiate
- If you want somebody to promise you page one, somebody will. That promise has to survive contact with Google, and it never does.
The point
Why you are reading this before you pay
The alternative is you finding out in month three.
Almost all the friction in this industry sits in one gap: what you reasonably believed you were buying, against what your supplier reasonably believed they were selling. Neither of you is lying. It was simply never written down.
So here it is, written down, before the money, on a page you can print and hand to your accountant. If any of it changes your mind, that is worth knowing today, and it has cost you nothing to find out.