I’ve got a kid and another one on the way, and I build these sites around a full time job. Which means I don’t have six weeks. I don’t have four. I have narrow, defended blocks of time and a hard stop when somebody needs dinner.
People assume that’s the constraint I work around. It’s actually the reason the process works.
When you genuinely cannot take six weeks, you stop doing the things that take six weeks. And it turns out almost all of those things were meetings.
What agencies do with four to eight weeks
Not building. Coordinating.
A discovery meeting. Then a proposal. Then a kickoff. Then wireframes, sent for review, waiting on feedback. Then a design comp, sent for review, waiting on feedback. Then it goes to a developer who wasn’t in any of those meetings, so there’s a handoff meeting. Then a copywriter needs the content, which needs a content meeting.
The actual work in there is maybe a week. The rest is five people trying to stay in sync, and you’re paying for every hour of it.
I’m one person who designs, writes, and builds. There’s nobody to sync with. That’s most of the four weeks, gone.
The seven days
Day one, twenty minutes on the phone. You tell me what you do, who you want more of, and what’s actually been frustrating about getting customers. I ask about pricing, service area, and what you say to people in the driveway when they ask what you do, because that last one is usually the best copy in the whole project.
Then you send me whatever you have. Photos, your logo, your current site, your reviews. Whatever’s in your phone is fine. Nobody needs to prepare anything.
Days two through four, I build. You don’t hear from me and you don’t sit in anything. This is the part that would have been three rounds of approvals. Instead I make the decisions, because that judgment is what you hired.
I write your copy during this. Not fill-in-the-blank copy. Actual copy based on how you talked on day one.
Day five, you see it. Not a mockup. Not a PDF. The real site at a real address, on your phone, working. You tap the buttons. You submit the form. You send it to your wife.
Then you tell me what’s wrong with it. Everybody has notes and everybody should.
Day six, I fix your notes. Usually a few hours. Copy tweaks, a photo swap, a color you don’t love.
Day seven, it’s live. On your domain, SSL on, Google listing connected, analytics tracking calls and form fills from the first hour. I send you the files. You own them.
What I need from you
Total, across the whole week: about forty minutes.
Twenty on the call day one. Twenty looking at it day five and telling me what to change.
That’s the entire ask. You don’t write anything, learn anything, install anything, or attend anything. If forty minutes is more than you can find, we probably shouldn’t work together, and I mean that without any edge.
The objection
“Seven days sounds too fast to be good.”
Fair. Here’s my answer.
The site still passes the same forty two point check before it goes live. Schema, load speed, contrast, mobile at four screen widths, working forms, valid markup, no broken links. That check is automated and it doesn’t care how fast I went.
What got compressed isn’t quality. It’s waiting. Waiting for a review cycle, waiting for a handoff, waiting for somebody’s Thursday to free up.
I also just work fast because I’ve done this for twenty years and I’m not figuring out what to build while I build it.
The other thing the constraint does
Deadlines that can’t move make you honest about scope.
When you’ve genuinely got a week, you don’t add a feature because it’d be neat. You build the thing that makes the phone ring and you leave out everything else. Which, as it happens, is also what makes a site convert.
I didn’t design it that way. Having a kid designed it that way. But I’d keep it either way.
