The most common question in a first conversation isn't about technology or price. It's about what this will actually look like in practice. Who talks to whom, what you need to provide, when you'll see the first result. Here's the full project process, no polish added.
The first 24 hours, and the workshop
Every message gets a reply within 24 hours. That's not a line from the website, it's an operating rule: if someone writes about a project, they get a specific answer or a question that moves things forward, the same business day.
That reply usually doesn't include a quote. It includes a few questions: what should happen after launch, what's the deadline, does anything already exist, and is there a decision maker on the other side. A quote without that information would be guesswork, and guessed quotes fall apart halfway through the project.
Then we sit down for one or two calls. We want to know who's buying, what the sales path looks like today, what isn't working in it, and how the company will know the project succeeded. We also ask about the uncomfortable stuff: where you're losing to competitors and what clients don't understand about your offer.
This stage looks unremarkable, but it decides the most. Half the bad websites on the internet exist because nobody asked, at the start, what the site is actually supposed to do. Fixes at this stage cost an hour of conversation. After launch, they cost weeks of work.
The workshop ends with a written summary: what we're building, for whom, what will count as success, and what we're deliberately not doing. That last point is often the most important one, because scope nobody bounded just keeps growing on its own through the whole project.
Quote: a fixed price for a fixed scope
After the workshop you get a scope written out point by point, and a fixed price for that scope, paid in stages. We don't bill by the hour, because on creative projects that shifts the risk onto the client and rewards slow work.
The price is built from the number of screens and templates, and whether we're designing from scratch or extending an existing identity. On top of that comes the amount of content to write and the number of integrations with your existing systems. Video and campaign management, if they're in the package, are priced separately.
Scope changes happen almost every time, and that's normal. There's one rule: we quote them before we do them. A client never gets an invoice with a line item they didn't know about.
The most common question is what a website's price actually depends on. More on the number of unique screens than the number of menu tabs, on whether the content is ready, and on how many systems need to connect to each other. Two sites with an identical menu can differ in cost by several times.
Stages: strategy, design, code, content
The work runs in stages, each with a clear sign-off point. Strategy and structure: what's on the site, in what order, and why. Design: key screens first, then the rest, in a system built to grow. Code: Next.js, React, TypeScript, with speed and accessibility built in from the first commit.
We write content alongside the design, not after it. A layout designed around "lorem ipsum" breaks the day real sentences arrive. If you have your own copywriter, we work with them; if not, we write it ourselves and send it for approval.
If video is part of the project, we plan the shoot day early, because weather and people's availability run on their own calendar. The footage needs to be ready for launch, not finished two months later.
At every stage we show work in progress, not a finished result at the end. That can feel uncomfortable, since you see unfinished things, but it lets us course correct in a week instead of after two months.
Launch and campaign start
We deploy new projects to our own Kubernetes cluster behind Cloudflare. Every code change goes through an automated build and lands on the server without manual file uploads. You get a staging environment early, so you see the site well before launch.
For the client, that means a predictable turnaround for a fix and the ability to roll back a change if something goes wrong. It also removes the situation where the site is down and nobody knows why, because the hosting belongs to someone else and no one has access to it.
Launching the site isn't the end, it's a precondition. After launch we set up tracking, then campaigns in the channels where your customers actually are. Sometimes that's Meta and local press, like with development projects. Sometimes it's Google and LinkedIn, if sales run through quote requests.
The report comes every month, on a single page: what we did, what it produced, what we're changing. No glossary of jargon and no charts meant to impress rather than explain anything.
Why one team instead of three agencies
The typical setup looks like this: a design studio handles branding, a software house builds the site, and a marketing agency runs campaigns. Each of these companies does its own part well, and each assumes the problem lies with the others. The client ends up as translator between three teams they didn't hire to have to manage.
With us, strategy, design, code, video and campaigns are handled by the same people. Footage from a shoot lands on the website and in ads in the same visual language. When a campaign shows a headline isn't working, we fix it on the site that same day, with no back and forth over who's paying for it.
That doesn't mean we always do everything ourselves. For highly specialized tasks, like studio product photography or sworn translations, we bring in outside people. The difference is that we manage them and own the result, instead of sending the client off to yet another company.
It also pays off on the second and third project. We already know the brand, we have the source files, and we know what worked before, so the next job starts from a higher baseline.
What you get at the end
Full rights to the project and code, the repository, access to everything that was built, documentation, and a short training session on how to run it. Source files for the graphics and video materials, including working versions, are yours too.
We don't build dependency on us. If in a year you want to move the project to another team, they'll have everything they need to keep going. In practice, clients stay, but that should be their choice, not the result of locked access to their own site.
We treat the handover itself as its own stage, not just sending a link. We schedule a call where we show how to change content, where the access credentials are, and what to do if something breaks. The recording of that call stays with the client, because the person responsible for the website tends to change jobs faster than the website itself does.
When we're not the right choice
If you need the cheapest website on the market, you'll find cheaper providers, and there's nothing wrong with that. Our work makes sense when a website or a campaign needs to sell something, not just exist.
We're also not the right address if someone just wants hands to execute a finished design with no right to ask questions, if decisions in the company get made by committee with no single person accountable, or if the deadline is so tight the only option is a template filled with text. In that last case, we say so plainly on the first call.
Before you send an inquiry anywhere, write down two things: what should change in the company after launch, and how you'll know it worked. With those two sentences, every conversation with a provider moves faster, and the quotes you get back will actually be comparable.
When you're ready, write to hello@dopest.studio. We reply within 24 hours, including to questions that are still just a loose idea.
