A written account of what your site is saying, and where it no longer matches the business behind it.

Before I read a word of the site, I need to understand the business as it actually runs now. That comes first through a written intake, where you answer questions about the practice, the clients, and the site, which you complete before we speak. A 30-minute kickoff call follows, where you fill in what the intake left open.

Then I read the site twice. First as your best prospective client would — without context, without the benefit of the doubt, clicking through every page as someone who doesn't already know you. Then the second time, against the practice as it actually runs. The gap between those two readings is where the problem lives.

Roughly ten days after the kickoff you receive a single written assessment, organized by priority tier. Immediate findings come first. These are almost always removals and corrections, things that can be addressed without waiting for a redesign, sometimes in a single afternoon. Short-term and medium-term findings follow, sequenced so you know what depends on what and what can wait. The document includes a page-by-page account of what your best prospective client encounters when she arrives at the site without context, and it covers whatever layers the problem actually touches — strategy, positioning, information architecture, copy, visual coherence, technical issues — with a competitive read applied throughout. The full assessment of how the site looks and feels in the browser happens in the debrief, where we can look at it together.

The debrief is 60 minutes, recorded on request, and scheduled after the document has arrived and you've had time to read it.

The document is yours to act on, whether that's on your own, with your current designer or developer, or as the start of what comes next here. If you continue to The Positioning Intensive within 60 days, the cost of The Review applies toward it.

If the kickoff conversation makes clear that this isn't the right fit, I'll say so. Nothing is invoiced until we both agree it makes sense.

This starts the same way the Review does: with a written intake, a kickoff call, and me reading the site against the practice and determining where the two have come apart. Before I go any further, I show you what I found and you tell me whether I've got it right. Everything I build will sit on top of that reading.

The work runs four weeks and produces three key documents.

The positioning document is the strategic foundation. It outlines where you sit in your field; the category you occupy and what you don't compete in; who the right client is and the signals that distinguish her; and the five or six claims that differentiate you from the practices your best prospective client would otherwise consider. These are ordered by weight, written precisely enough that none of them could be made by anyone else. This is the document that every future piece of language about the practice gets checked against. When something feels wrong and you can't say why, the answer is usually in here.

There's a checkpoint at the end of week two, where I show you the positioning document and we pressure-test it before the messaging is written. We talk through any changes so we can confidently move forward with the messaging. The messaging system is the positioning made usable: the headline, the homepage statement, the short bio for directories and introductions and proposals, and the vocabulary — the words that carry the current practice and the ones that are working against it. Every piece of language in this system is written to pass one test: could it appear on a competitor's site? If yes, it isn't finished.

The site brief is the architecture — what pages exist, what goes on each one, the sequence within each page, and why, written specifically enough that any developer or copywriter could execute from it without asking what you meant. If I'm the one building the site, this is also what ensures we aren't negotiating the structure once the design has begun.

The final debrief is 60 minutes, organized around the brief, so you leave with a clear picture of where to go next.

If you've already done The Review, you pay the difference. The foundational work is done, and we pick up from there. If The Site follows within 60 days, the cost of The Positioning Intensive applies toward it.

This is the build, and it starts from a finished Positioning Intensive. The brief is written, the architecture is decided, and the strategic questions are already answered.

Platform. This is decided in the first week based on what the site actually needs: how often the content will change, whether you'll be making routine edits yourself, how complex the architecture is. I build using either Squarespace, Wordpress, or Webflow, or I can create a custom solution. The platform is a technical decision that follows from a strategic one.

Design. The design presentation is the homepage and a handful of key sections — enough to establish the visual direction, the type, the palette, the way the components behave together, without locking down every detail before the build has started. You review it, return written feedback, and one focused round of revisions follows.

Build. The site is built on the chosen platform, with all the development work, the third-party integrations the practice uses — scheduling tools, payment processors, form handlers — and, where the platform and your workflow call for it, the CMS configuration that lets you make routine content updates yourself. The staging review happens when the build is complete, with all the content in place.

Launch. After launch, there are thirty days of post-launch support. Anything that surfaces in that window gets handled: something that behaves unexpectedly, a content change you want made before you're comfortable making it yourself, anything that didn't surface during staging.

You're needed at four points: kickoff, design presentation, staging review, and launch. The rest of the time, I'm working, and you're running your practice.

What this isn't: a template with your content poured into it, a site that looks like every other site in your field because no one stopped to ask what makes yours different, or a process that needs your constant attention to keep moving.

A site isn't finished when it launches. The business under it keeps moving — a service changes, a page that was accurate six months ago becomes outdated, new work needs a place to live. None of that is a problem until it's left alone long enough that the gap between the site and the business is wide enough to need rebuilding.

A retainer is how you skip that cycle. The site stays current and aligned with where the business actually is, with the changes made by the same person who built it, so nothing drifts and nothing gets handed to someone who has to guess at what you meant.

Both tiers are for existing Partial History clients. We talk through scope directly before anything starts.