Custom web design & build
The machine your business run on
Owned from day one, on your own domain — a site that outlives any subscription. Fast, credible, built to turn visitors into inquiries, and designed from scratch for your business — never a theme with your logo dropped in.
Before this one
The website you didn’t choose
Most small-business websites arrive one of three ways. All three end up in the same place: a site you can’t change, can’t move, and can’t tell whether it’s doing anything at all.
Your software threw one in
Field-service platforms bundle a website now, and they are decent. The catch is where it lives: on their subdomain, on their platform, ending the day the subscription does — along with whatever search engines had spent three years learning about it.
Someone built it in a weekend
A relative, a friend, a first version you put together yourself. It did the job at the time. Nobody has been able to change it since, and the person who could has moved on.
You paid for it once
A real build, years ago, from someone who no longer answers. It still works, in the sense that it loads. Nothing about it has moved since launch, including the parts that stopped being true.
Your website has one job: convincing a stranger that you're the safe choice, then making it effortless to reach you. Most small-business websites fail at both. They load slowly, bury the phone number, read like they were written for other people in your industry, and look like the same template your competitor bought. Visitors don't complain about any of this — they just leave.
We build the opposite. Every Harbor Tree site starts with how your customers actually decide: what they're worried about, what they compare, what convinces them. The design, the copy and the structure are all built around that decision — which is why our sites feel less like brochures and more like your best salesperson, working around the clock.
Underneath, we build pages that load almost instantly, and we hold every one of them to a 90+ score on Google's own speed test. The work that helps search engines rank your site — and AI assistants recommend it when someone asks them instead — is included as standard, not sold back to you later. And because it's built properly, it keeps earning long after launch day rather than looking good once. You own the parts that matter from day one: your web address, the code and the content.
A good fit if
- Your current site is out of date, slow, or embarrassing to send to a prospect
- You're getting traffic but few inquiries
- You're launching something new and want to look established from day one
The builds
Three sizes, one fixed price each
A one-time fee to design and build the site. The domain, code and content are yours from day one. Care keeps it online — hosting, backups and monitoring — and comes with every build, priced in full below.
Already have a site? Start with the Website Audit, $375. We look at what you have and tell you whether it is worth improving, worth replacing, or already fine — and the fee comes off whatever you do next.
Foundation
One location, one story to tell. A site that loads fast, reads clearly and asks for the job.
3–6 weeks from kickoff, date fixed in your quote
One-time — and your first 30 days of Care come with it
- A contact form that reaches you in one tap with the junk filtered out before it does
- Analytics wired in so you can see which pages produce inquiries
- Readable by search engines and AI assistants your business, hours and service area written into the markup both read — and your questions marked up so the answers can show in results directly
- Google Search Console and Bing, in your name so what the search engines report comes to you, and we read it over your shoulder
- Scoped at about eight pages
- Two structured rounds of design revisions one set of consolidated feedback each, so the date in your quote survives them
- Your first 30 days of Care, included hosting, a daily backup, security updates and uptime monitoring while the site settles in, then $99 a month only if you keep it
Growth
Several services or areas, each earning its own traffic. Pages that rank on their own, booking wired to your calendar, and copy written for all of it.
5–8 weeks from kickoff, date fixed in your quote
$1,024 of the add-on menu is already inside this price — Copywriting at $449 and Online booking at $575 — plus 60 days of Care worth $198.
Everything in Foundation, plus:
- Online booking wired straight into your calendar
- Copywriting for every page drafted by us, with two rounds of revisions included
- The pages wired to each other on purpose every service and area page linking to the ones a reader would ask for next, so nothing on your site is a dead end
- Scoped at fifteen to twenty pages including location or service pages that rank on their own
- Three structured rounds of design revisions one set of consolidated feedback each, so the date in your quote survives them
- Your first 60 days of Care, included hosting, a daily backup, security updates and uptime monitoring while the site settles in, then $99 a month only if you keep it
Signature
More than one location, or you sell online. Every location and service covered, payments handled, wired into the systems you already run.
6–10 weeks from kickoff, date fixed in your quote
$1,024 of the add-on menu is already inside this price — Copywriting at $449 and Online booking at $575 — plus 90 days of Care worth $297.
Everything in Growth, plus:
- Sell online with card payments handled securely
- Your product list, tax and postage set up a catalogue of up to 100 products
- Up to three custom integrations with software you already pay for
- Front of the line through launch every email answered the same business day
- Up to 30 pages every location and every service covered, with the exact list agreed in your plan
- Four structured rounds of design revisions one set of consolidated feedback each, so the date in your quote survives them
- Your first 90 days of Care, included hosting, a daily backup, security updates and uptime monitoring while the site settles in, then $99 a month only if you keep it
Every build
None of this is an upgrade
- Designed from scratch never a theme with your logo dropped in
- Built mobile-first and tested on real devices, not just a narrow browser window
- Findable on Google search-engine groundwork and your Google Business Profile wired to the site
- A 90+ performance score measured on Google's own test before you go live
- Your inquiries actually arrive the form's mail is signed and sent from your own domain, with the records that keep it out of spam folders, and a test inquiry watched into your inbox before you go live
- Yours from day one domain, code and content
- Secure the day it ships security headers, encrypted transport and cookie handling set and tested before you go live, and your keys held in managed storage rather than sitting in the code — never sold back to you as a hardening package
Side by side
Everything each build includes
| Foundation$1,900 | Growth$4,500 | Signature$7,500 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scope and design | |||
| Pages | About eight | Fifteen to twenty | Up to 30 |
| Structured design rounds | Two | Three | Four |
| Delivery window from kickoff | 3–6 weeks | 5–8 weeks | 6–10 weeks |
| Copywriting for every page, drafted by us | Not included | Included | Included |
| Location and service pages built to rank on their own | Not included | Included | Included |
| None of this is an upgrade | |||
| Designed from scratch | Included | Included | Included |
| Built mobile-first | Included | Included | Included |
| Findable on Google | Included | Included | Included |
| A 90+ performance score | Included | Included | Included |
| Your inquiries actually arrive | Included | Included | Included |
| Yours from day one | Included | Included | Included |
| Secure the day it ships | Included | Included | Included |
| Wired to how you work | |||
| Contact form, with the junk filtered out before it reaches you | Included | Included | Included |
| Analytics wired in | Included | Included | Included |
| Online booking, straight into the calendar you already keep | Not included | Included | Included |
| Card payments taken on the site | Not included | Not included | Included |
| An online store — product list, tax and postage set up | Not included | Not included | Up to 100 products |
| Custom integrations with software you already pay for | Not included | Not included | Up to three |
| Found on Google | |||
| Your business, hours and area written into the markup search engines and AI assistants read | Included | Included | Included |
| Your questions marked up so answers can show in results directly | Included | Included | Included |
| Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, set up in your name | Included | Included | Included |
| Internal linking planned and built, so no page is a dead end | Not included | Included | Included |
| After you launch | |||
| Care included, at no charge | 30 days | 60 days | 90 days |
| Every email answered the same business day, through launch | Not included | Not included | Included |
| Terms, on every tier | |||
| Domain, code and content in your name from day one | Included | Included | Included |
| Full refund at the design stage if the direction is not right | Included | Included | Included |
| Pay in up to 12 monthly installments, same price | Included | Included | Included |
| Fixed quote agreed before any work starts | Included | Included | Included |
A cross on a smaller tier is a price, not a refusal. Almost everything here is on the add-on menu and can be added to any build — Online booking is $575, Deposits and payments is $595, Copywriting is $449 — quoted before it is built and never discovered on an invoice.
- What Signature covers
- Signature covers up to 30 pages, a catalogue of 100 products and three custom integrations. Need more than that? It is priced from the add-on menu and agreed before anything is built — never discovered on an invoice.
- How you pay
- Every build can also be paid in up to 12 equal monthly installments at no extra cost — same price, different dates.
- What happens after launch
- Every build lands on Care for its first weeks at no charge — 30 days with Foundation, 60 days with Growth, 90 days with Signature. When the window ends we email you before anything is billed, and Care continues at $99 a month only if you want it. If you would rather take the site elsewhere, that is what "yours from day one" means: say so and we hand over the domain, the code and the content, and help you move it.
See the full breakdown — every line, with tax and the payment schedule.
What a build looks like changes by industry — see how we build for yours.
Keeping it running
There are no plugins to patch and no logins to defend here, and the framework updates that do come are ours to apply — so these plans buy hosting, backups, monitoring and a person who answers, not a standing repair bill for parts that break on their own.
Care
Keeps the site live, fast and current. Attaches to any build.
$99/ month
Billed monthly, plus 3% MD sales tax — cancel with 30 days’ notice
- Hosting and a backup every day with the padlock that shows visitors your site is secure
- Security and software updates
- Uptime monitoring so an outage reaches us the moment it happens rather than waiting for someone to notice
- A dependency and deprecation review every quarter the software your site runs on goes stale quietly — we check what has fallen behind, what the framework has deprecated, and whether an upgrade cost you speed, with the regressions fixed on the plan
- Thirty minutes of content edits a month by email, handled by the next business day
Care is plumbing, not a product. It keeps what you own running.
Care Plus
The same plumbing, on a faster clock and actively defended — for sites where a day of waiting costs money and a published flaw cannot wait for the next update round.
$199/ month
Billed monthly, plus 3% MD sales tax — cancel with 30 days’ notice
- Everything in Care, on a same business day response a stated commitment rather than a target, with your edits ahead of standard Care work in the queue
- Sixty minutes of content edits a month by email
- Security patched on announcement, not on a cycle when a flaw is published in something your site runs on, it is fixed that day rather than in the next update round
- File-integrity monitoring if what is deployed stops matching what we deployed, that raises an alarm rather than waiting for somebody to notice
- The firewall in front of your site kept current as attack patterns change
- A vulnerability scan every week against the live site, and anything it finds fixed on the plan
- Your security headers, encryption and cookies held to that floor on every change we ship checked before it goes out, so a change can't quietly undo what the site shipped with
Care Plus is Care on a faster clock, with the security your site shipped with kept current as new flaws are announced. If next business day is fine and you do not need the site watched that closely, Care is the right buy.
Care Complete
Keeps the site found and improving, not just running and defended — the technical SEO, the numbers behind it, and a quarterly look at what to do next.
$349/ month
Billed monthly, plus 3% MD sales tax — cancel with 30 days’ notice
- Everything in Care Plus on the same business day response, with the security kept current
- Technical SEO upkeep schema, sitemaps, broken links and speed regressions caught and fixed before they cost you rankings — the same structure AI assistants read before recommending anyone
- A monthly report in plain language how many people came, which pages they landed on, how many sent the form and how many tapped to call
- A security section in that report what got blocked, what got patched, and anything that needs a decision from you
- A conversion review each quarter of whichever page is bringing you the most traffic
- A written incident runbook who does what, in what order, with the phone numbers already in it — so the worst morning of the year is not also the one you improvise
- A quarterly access review every account that can reach the site, the hosting and the code, re-checked and cut back to who actually needs it, with the leavers found
Care Complete works on the site itself — the pages, the code and the numbers behind them. The monthly edit allowance covers changes to pages you already have. A new or rewritten page is a separate piece of work and is quoted at the add-on rate — no plan includes one.
The monthly edit allowance covers changes to pages you already have. A new or rewritten page is a separate piece of work and is quoted at the add-on rate — no plan includes one.
Already have a site?
Migration · $1,250
The site you already have, rebuilt on our stack and moved across without losing the addresses Google has spent years learning. Delivered as a working site, a redirect for every old page, and a written record of what moved where.
Works from any platform. WordPress and Squarespace can hand over most of their content directly; Wix cannot export a site at all, so those pages are rebuilt from what is published. The price is the same either way — which of the three you are on changes our work, not your bill.
- Every address inventoried crawled from your live site and read off your sitemap — and if you can export your page list from Google, we will fold that in too, so the pages you forgot are on the list
- A permanent redirect for every one old address to new, so a link someone published in 2019 still lands, and every search engine is told where the page went rather than left to find a dead end
- Titles and descriptions carried across what search engines already show for you is preserved, improved where it is weak, and never silently dropped
- Every page rebuilt on our stack custom-coded, mobile-first, fast — the same chassis a new build gets, with your content in it rather than a theme
- Structured data rebuilt the machine-readable description of your business, written fresh, so search engines re-learn it rather than guessing from a page-builder's leftovers
- Watched after launch every redirect followed and every page checked for the first sixty days, and anything we find broken fixed at our cost
A migration reproduces the site you have. It is not a redesign — the pages, the words and the look come across as they are, and if what you want is for them to be better, that is a build rather than a move. The Website Audit exists to tell you which of the two you actually need, and we would rather say so before you pay than after.
Already buying a build? Then you do not need the $1,250 above. Your build is making the pages, so all that is left of a move is carrying your old links onto them — that is Link continuity at $750, on the add-on menu below. Never both, and never the same pages twice.
How it’s built
Written, not assembled
Most small-business websites are an assembly: a theme, a page builder, and twenty or thirty plugins from different companies, each on its own release schedule. Yours is written — the pages a browser downloads, and nothing behind them.
No ceiling on the design
A page builder can only make the shapes it was built to make, so “custom” inside one means custom within its range. There is no range here — what gets drawn is what gets built, shaped to how your business actually works.
Nothing for you to patch
No admin login, no database, no plugin marketplace — the parts that fail on an assembled site aren't there to fail. The framework underneath does take security updates, and applying them is our job: a handful of packages we chose, bumped on our schedule and put through a build before they reach your site. Not thirty from thirty authors, landing live on yours.
Fast because it's empty
Speed isn't a package bought afterwards. Nothing ships a framework to visitors who never use it, so the pages arrive quickly on a phone on a bad signal — and stay that way, because nobody can install anything into them.
Measured before it ships
Contrast, keyboard access and load time are checked page by page against WCAG AA before launch, not promised in a paragraph. If something fails, it gets fixed before you ever see it.
Add-ons
Make it yours
Every build takes add-ons — at kickoff, or long after launch. Flat prices, done by the same hands that built the site.
Words, pictures and brand
What the site says and how it looks. The inputs a build waits on most often, priced so they never hold up a launch.
Extra page
$225 per page
Another service, area or story — built and designed to match the rest of the site, not bolted on. Send us the words, or add Copywriting and we write them.
Copywriting
$449 one-time
Every page drafted by us from one working call, with two rounds of revisions — for when “I’ll send the text over” never happens.
Included with Growth and Signature.
Photo cleanup
$200 per 20 photos
The photos you already have, made to look like they belong on the site — straightened, evenly lit, and matched to each other so a page of them reads as one set rather than five phones and four afternoons. Send what is on your phone and the pages get built around what comes back.
They need to be your own photos of your own work. What comes back is that photograph looking its best: nothing is added to it, taken out of it or swapped into it, because a picture of work you did not do is a problem that lands on you rather than on us. Nobody comes out to shoot — this is the photos you have, not photography.
Logo & brand refresh
$349 one-time
Your existing mark cleaned up, colors and type chosen to carry it, and a one-page sheet so everything you print matches the site.
Film homepage
$875 one-time, then $125 per scene beyond the third
Your homepage as one continuous shot — a camera flying through three scenes of the work you do, moving as the visitor scrolls and stopping when they stop, with the words sitting over the film rather than beside it.
The scenes are made rather than filmed: a world built to look like your work, not footage of your premises. It is one unbroken take, so the round of changes is on the storyboard before anything is rendered — swapping a scene afterwards means re-rendering the two either side of it, quoted as new work. Phones and anyone who has asked their device for less motion get a still frame from the film and the standard homepage beneath it.
Wiring it to how you work
The site doing a job rather than describing one — taking the booking, taking the deposit, answering the question that starts every call.
Online booking
$575 one-time
Your real availability on the page, wired to the calendar you already keep — with the notice, travel time and blocked-out hours you actually work, so a booking that lands is one you can keep.
Included with Growth and Signature.
Deposits and payments
$595 one-time
Take a deposit, settle an invoice or get paid for a callout, straight from the site — into the payment account you already hold, with the money landing in your bank rather than ours.
This is a payment page, not a shop: no product catalogue, no tax table, no postage. Those come with Signature. You generate the key inside your own payment account and hand us that; we never hold the account and never touch the settlement.
Instant estimate
$645 one-time
A page that answers “what will this cost?” before anyone picks up the phone — your rates, your rules, a range on the screen in seconds, and the details landing with you as a lead rather than a form nobody filled in.
It gives a range and starts a conversation. It is not a quote, nothing it prints binds you to a price, and it says so on the page — an instrument that pretends to be a quote is one you end up honouring.
Reaching more people
The same site, in front of people it does not reach today — in another language, or in front of the person you want to hire.
Your site in Spanish
$395 one-time, then $45 per translated page
The site you already have, in Spanish — a switcher in the menu, every form and error message translated too, and each page told search engines about properly so the right version is the one that turns up.
The whole site goes across rather than a chosen few pages — a switcher that lands a Spanish speaker back on English is worse than not offering one — so the count is whatever your site already is, not a list to pick from. Priced per page because a page is more than its body text — the forms, the error messages and what search engines are told about each version all have to be right too. What we can build is a site your Spanish-speaking customers can read; whether it brings you more of them is not ours to promise.
Careers page
$350 one-time
A page for the job you are trying to fill, with applications arriving in their own inbox rather than mixed in with the quotes — same spam filtering, same guarantee that what someone sends actually reaches you.
Moving in, and staying reachable
For a business that already has a site, an address people have published, and mail it cannot afford to lose.
Link continuity
$750 one-time
Moving from an existing site? Every old address inventoried and permanently redirected to its new home, your titles and descriptions carried across, and every redirect checked for sixty days after launch — so a link someone published years ago still lands, and search engines are told where each page went rather than left to find dead ends.
This is the half of a move a build does not already cover. Your build is making the new pages; this carries your old links onto them. If you are not buying a build, what you want is Migration at $1,250 — that one rebuilds your existing site as well as carrying it across. The difference between them is the rebuild, not a discount, and you are never charged for both.
Email deliverability
$295 one-time
Mail from your own domain going to spam? We find out why and fix it — the sender records set properly, anything conflicting cleared out, and test messages sent until they land where they should. You generate any key inside your own mail account and hand us the record; we never need your inbox.
Past Signature’s bounds
Signature covers up to 30 pages, a catalogue of 100 products and three custom integrations. Need more than that? It is priced from the add-on menu and agreed before anything is built — never discovered on an invoice.
Extra integration
$695 per integration
The site talking to software you already pay for — a lead landing in the system your crews work from, booking reading the calendar that actually decides your week, a quote arriving as a draft instead of something to retype at nine at night.
You generate the key inside your own account and hand us that — never the login. The price covers building and testing the connection; if the other company changes how theirs works later, putting it right is Care or hourly, because nobody can promise to maintain a platform they do not run.
Catalogue block
$475 per 50 products
Selling more than the 100 products Signature covers? Each block of 50 more is loaded, priced, taxed and set up for postage the same way the first hundred were — quoted before it is built, never found on an invoice afterwards.
Straight answers
What we won’t tell you
We will not promise you a ranking
Nobody can, and the ones who do are selling you a feeling. We do the work that helps search engines — and the AI assistants people now ask instead — read and understand your site, and it is included in every build. But where you land, and who an AI names, is theirs to decide, not ours to sell.
We will not promise you more booked jobs
That depends on your prices, your sales and your market, and we control none of the three. What we control is that every inquiry reaches you, fast, from a site that makes you look like the safe choice.
We will not take on a site we did not build and call it safe
The server would be someone else's, the code someone else's, and every third-party piece in it chosen by someone who has since moved on. We will audit it and tell you honestly whether it is worth moving. We will not put our name on a stack we cannot maintain.
The difference
Same business.
Different website.
Drag the line. The “before” is a real client’s homepage the day they came to us — the “after” is the rebuild we shipped for the same business.
← Before — the site you apologize for
Drag to compare
the site that wins the job — After →
That “after” is MJH’s real homepage building a house as you scroll — not a mock-up of one. Open the real site ↗, or read the full rebuild in the MJH Construction case study →
The rebuild opens on a preview link — MJH's domain hasn't switched over yet, so mjhconstruction.com still serves the original site. You're comparing the finished rebuild against the site that's still live on their domain.
Ownership
What happens to your website when you stop paying?
A website bundled with software is a feature of that software. One built for your business is built to win you work — and it’s still yours the day you leave.
- The website bundled with your scheduling software
- Gone when you cancel — and it lived on their web address, not yours.
- A site on a DIY builder subscription
- Offline the month you stop paying for the plan.
- A pay-monthly website program
- Depends on the fine print — with many, the site was never yours to keep.
- A Harbor Tree build
- Nothing changes. The domain, the code and the content are yours.
The long version, and what to ask before you sign with anyone: who owns your website? →
Service areas
We build across every county in Maryland
Baltimore-based and working remotely, so the county line has never decided who we build for — including outside Maryland. There is a page for each of the 24 Maryland jurisdictions covering what that market actually runs on: the employers, the trades, and the way customers there go looking.
Start a project
Ready for a site that wins the job?
Tell us what you're working with. You'll get a plain-language reply — and if we're not the right fit, we'll say so and point you somewhere good.
Don't like the first design? Take your money back. What it covers
Want the number first? Build an estimate — a minute, and no email needed.
Not ready? Check your Google listing — free, about ten seconds.
Prefer email? contact@theharbortree.com
Tell us what you need
Three fields. Takes about thirty seconds.