A retainer that absorbed a Shopify 2.0 rebuild.
The team came to us with an outgrown theme and stayed on a biweekly development. The 2.0 rebuild happened inside the retainer, not as a separate project.
Web services that go the distance
A website is never really finished. We build accessible, well-maintained sites and applications, and we keep working with you after launch so they stay that way.
The starting point
Where most sites are when they reach us
The site was built for the business you were two years ago. Since then the plugins piled up, the person who knew the theme left, and every small change takes a week longer than it should.
We pick up the whole thing. Updates and security, the accessibility problems nobody flagged, the integrations that keep breaking, and the new pages your marketing calendar keeps asking for.
The services
What sits inside a website engagement
Most clients use several of these at once on a single retainer rather than buying them as separate projects.
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Maintenance
Regular updates, security patches, and performance checks so your site stays healthy without you thinking about it.
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Audits
A prioritized list of what is broken, slow, or leaving people out, with the reasoning behind every recommendation.
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Accessibility
WCAG 2.1 AA builds and remediation so everyone can use your site and your legal exposure goes down.
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Integrations & APIs
Connect your site to the CRMs, payment processors, and booking tools your team already uses every day.
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Page Building
New pages built fast, to your brand specs, and structured so your team can maintain them later.
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Application Building
Custom portals, dashboards, and intake tools for when off-the-shelf software stops fitting how you work.
Room to grow
When the work gets bigger, the retainer adapts
Most of the time, a retainer is steady. Sometimes it isn't. A reporter calls and a page needs to be live in three hours. A new product line means a new section of the site. The board asks for a redesign.
When that happens, the same team you've been working with picks it up. We adjust scope, draw on unused hours when they're available, and have an honest conversation about the rest. There's no separate engagement to start, and no new vendor to onboard.
A retainer that handled a HIPAA-aware data incident.
They joined us on a steady cadence of two-week sprints. When an unrelated platform incident touched protected health information, we handled the response inside the same engagement.
Common questions
Honest answers to the questions we get most
- What platforms do you support?
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All of them, in the sense that we've worked across most major and a lot of niche ones. We're most experienced with WordPress, Shopify, and custom Ruby on Rails applications. If your stack is something we haven't worked in before, we'll tell you that on the consultation, and we'll be honest about whether we're the right fit.
- Will you maintain a site you didn't build?
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Yes, often. Our retainer practice started largely with sites built by other teams. We'll do a short technical and accessibility audit before the retainer starts so we both know what we're working with.
- Do you charge extra for refreshes, integrations, or new pages?
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Sometimes. Small additions usually fit inside your existing hours. Larger initiatives, like a full refresh or a multi-week integration, often expand scope. We talk about that explicitly when it comes up. There are no hidden charges.
- How fast do you respond to emergencies?
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Response SLAs are tier-dependent and written into your contract. The Steady tier is within two business days for non-urgent work and within twenty-four hours for site-down emergencies. Active and In motion tiers tighten that further.
- Can my team update the site after launch?
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Yes. We build on a CMS your team can manage, and structure the design so new pages can reuse what already exists.
Let's talk
Want someone to own the website side of things?
Bring your site, your platform, and the two or three things that keep slipping. We will tell you what we would fix first and what a steady month with us looks like.
If a retainer is more than you need right now, we will say that too.
