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Website Development and Design
Design decides how your site looks. Development decides whether it gets found - and whether visitors become customers.
Design and Development Are Not the Same Thing
This distinction matters more than any other on this page, so it goes first.Design deals with how a site looks: layout, colour, imagery, and the impression it makes in the first three seconds.
Development deals with how it is built: the site architecture, the code behind it, how fast it loads, how it behaves on a phone, and whether a search engine can read and rank it at all.
A site can look excellent and be invisible. That is the most common and most expensive mistake a small business makes with its website, and it is usually discovered six months after the invoice is paid.
First Impressions Still Decide
We all know first impressions are crucial, in business as anywhere else. Nine times out of ten the first impression makes or breaks a sale, and the same holds for your website.The right impression keeps a visitor on the page and eventually turns them into a customer. The wrong one sends them to the back button and to your competitor. We are passionate about building websites that are both easy to manage and compelling to use, with navigable layouts, considered visuals, and content worth reading.
None of that matters if nobody arrives. Which is the other half of the job.
Built To Be Found, Not Retrofitted Later
We have spent since 2007 doing SEO and Google Business Profile optimization, which means most of the sites we see were built by someone who never had to make one rank.The faults are consistent, and all of them are cheaper to prevent than to fix:
⌖ Page titles and descriptions missing, duplicated, or generated from
the template.
⌖ Headings used for their size rather than their structure, so every heading on the page is the same level.
⌖ Images ten times larger than the space they are displayed in, making the site slow on the phones most visitors use.
⌖ No structured data, so search engines and AI answer engines have to guess what the business is.
⌖ Service pages of two hundred words that cannot compete with a competitor's twelve hundred.
We build with those handled from the start, because we are the ones who would otherwise
have to come back and fix them.
⌖ Headings used for their size rather than their structure, so every heading on the page is the same level.
⌖ Images ten times larger than the space they are displayed in, making the site slow on the phones most visitors use.
⌖ No structured data, so search engines and AI answer engines have to guess what the business is.
⌖ Service pages of two hundred words that cannot compete with a competitor's twelve hundred.
What We Do
Our team handles the behind-the-scenes code and the applications that control your site's performance, and optimizes site architecture and structure for search ranking.Architecture and structure. How pages relate to each other, what links to what, and how a visitor and a crawler both find their way through.
Speed and mobile. Right-sized images, sensible stylesheets, and a layout that works on a phone rather than merely shrinking onto one.
Structured data. Machine-readable markup telling search engines and AI answer engines what your business is, what it offers, and where it operates.
Content that earns the position. Pages with enough substance to deserve ranking, written for customers rather than crawlers.
Conversion. Clear calls to action, forms that work, and tracking that shows which visits became customers.
Website Pricing
Starter - $3,495
Up to five pages. Mobile, fast, structured data, contact forms, and search foundations built in.
Business - $6,995
Up to fifteen pages, including service and location pages, content written for search, and conversion tracking.
Custom - from $12,000
Ecommerce, booking systems, member areas, or anything that needs building rather than assembling.
Care Plan - $95 per month
Hosting oversight, software updates, backups, uptime and speed monitoring, and small content changes. Optional.
For comparison, published 2026 figures put most professionally built small business
websites between $2,000 and $8,000, with advanced builds reaching
$15,000 or more. Freelancers typically charge $1,500 to $8,000; agencies $6,000
to $35,000.
Up to five pages. Mobile, fast, structured data, contact forms, and search foundations built in.
Business - $6,995
Up to fifteen pages, including service and location pages, content written for search, and conversion tracking.
Custom - from $12,000
Ecommerce, booking systems, member areas, or anything that needs building rather than assembling.
Care Plan - $95 per month
Hosting oversight, software updates, backups, uptime and speed monitoring, and small content changes. Optional.
If You Already Have a Website
A rebuild is not always the answer. Often the site is sound and the problem is that nothing was ever done to make it rank.We will tell you which it is. If your existing site needs optimization rather than replacement, that is an SEO engagement, and it costs considerably less than a new build.
One warning if you are rebuilding with anyone: a redesign that changes URLs without redirecting them, drops page titles, or removes content that was earning rankings can undo years of progress in a weekend. Ask whoever is quoting you how they will preserve your existing search footprint. If the question surprises them, that is your answer.
AI Search Is Built In
Structured data, headings phrased as real questions with the answer underneath, and business facts that agree with each other everywhere they appear. That is what answer engines such as Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity use when deciding what to cite. Structured data is the markup Google describes in Intro to how structured data markup works, and its guide to AI features and your website explains how pages are chosen for AI Overviews.It is the same work that helps Google rank the page, so we include it rather than billing it as a separate service. More on that on the SEO pricing page.
How This Fits With Everything Else
A website works alongside the map, not instead of it. Your Google Business Profile catches people ready to call now; the website catches people still comparing. Google also reads your website when judging whether your profile is legitimate, so a profile with a real site behind it tends to rank above one without.See Google Maps Marketing for the map side, or Google Ads if you need traffic before either has had time to build.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between web design and web development?
Design is how it looks. Development is how it is built, how fast it runs, and whether search engines can read it. A site can look excellent and still be invisible.How much does a small business website cost?
Most professional builds run $2,000 to $8,000 in 2026. Ours start at $3,495.Why did my new website rank worse than the old one?
Usually changed URLs with no redirects, dropped titles and headings, or removed content that was earning the rankings.Do I need a website if I have a Google Business Profile?
They do different jobs and reinforce each other. Google reads your site when judging your profile.Is it built for AI search too?
Yes, at no extra charge. It is the same work as building it properly for Google.Ready To Start?
Commercial websites do not succeed on their own. It takes a combination of steps and stages to make a site ready to perform in a competitive market.Contact eGumball today or call 1-800-890-8940, and our web development team will tell you whether you need a new site or a better-optimized one.