Freelance web design: one person designs and builds

It depends on the project, and I say that knowing I'm not neutral. An agency makes sense when you need many fronts covered at once — campaigns, media, content, web — with a large team coordinating it all. For one website done properly, a senior freelancer is usually the better buy: you talk directly to the person designing and building it, with no management layer adding cost and filtering everything.

The honest fine print: I work solo and take on few projects at a time, so you may have to wait for a slot to open in my calendar. If your project needs ten pairs of hands working in parallel from Monday, an agency will serve you better — and I have no problem saying so.

WordPress makes sense if you'll be publishing content constantly, your team needs to edit everything weekly and your budget calls for a theme. It's a legitimate option — with its tolls: plugins to update, security to watch and performance you have to fight for.

A custom site like the ones I build (designed and coded in Next.js) wins when you want a design that doesn't come from a theme anyone can buy, real speed and near-zero technical upkeep. I don't work with WordPress: if the first call shows that's what your case needs, I'll say so instead of selling you mine.

Within my ballpark range of €1,500–6,000: a well-crafted landing page — one page, one clear goal — sits at the low end, around €1,500–2,500. A multi-page corporate site with a CMS, animation and technical SEO moves toward the high end, between €3,500 and €6,000.

What moves the price: the number of pages and distinct layouts, whether you need a CMS, languages, and how much animation and illustration is involved. Either way the price covers both design and development, fixed in writing before we start — no mid-project surprises.

Sometimes yes, and sometimes starting over is cheaper than patching. What almost always survives: your content, what your analytics have already taught you, your domain and the search rankings it has earned over the years. What almost never survives: template code — rewriting it usually costs more than rebuilding it properly.

On the first call I'll look at your current site and tell you frankly what's worth keeping and what isn't. And if URLs change along the way, I set up the redirects so you don't lose the SEO you already have — that mistake is the expensive one.

Less than the maintenance industry wants you to believe, if the site is well built. The real fixed costs: the domain (€10–20 a year) and hosting, which for the sites I deliver usually stays under €25 a month — a custom site with no plugins has very little that can break.

My maintenance is optional, not a subscription in disguise: for the first 30 days after delivery any bug is on me, and beyond that I work by the hour or on a small monthly pack only if you genuinely need it. Domain and hosting are always in your name, so your site never depends on me to stay up.