Frequently Asked Questions

A Starter site is $250 and is ideal for individuals or organizations that need a non-complex site of up to 5 pages. We often recommend About and FAQ; you may choose services, pricing, or other informational pages instead.

All Deep Sea Fauna sites include: six (6) months of optional free hosting and support on our server; custom HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; mobile-first responsive design; two revision rounds; access to our client portal; all site files and a guide for moving your site to another host; plus an optional personalized digital contact card (just like Dot or Blinq). We are committed to WCAG 2.1 Level AA accessibility standards and presenting a positive experience for all site visitors.

A Standard site is the best option for organizations looking to grow their reach. All Standard sites, 6 to 10 pages, include a content management portal so you can update your own content or images. Tons of components, priced individually, are available for your pages such as a unlimited page blog, lead or inquiry database, custom forms or questionnaires, custom storefront, Amazon-affiliate links, or resource downloads, to name a few.

All Deep Sea Fauna sites include: six (6) months of optional free hosting and support on our server; custom HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; mobile-first responsive design; two revision rounds; access to our client portal; all site files and a guide for moving your site to another host; plus an optional personalized digital contact card (just like Dot or Blinq). We are committed to WCAG 2.1 Level AA accessibility standards and presenting a positive experience for all site visitors.

Premium sites are for organizations that need their website to do real work: for example authenticated member or volunteer logins to access or upload information, or integrations with calendaring and other tools.

Premium builds (11+ pages) are quoted after discovery.

All Deep Sea Fauna sites include: six (6) months of optional free hosting and support on our server; custom HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; mobile-first responsive design; two revision rounds; access to our client portal; all site files (available after final payment) and a guide for moving your site to another host; plus an optional personalized digital contact card (just like Dot or Blinq). We are committed to WCAG 2.1 Level AA accessibility standards and presenting a positive experience for all site visitors.

After it's finished, if you want your site to have a home on the internet where people can visit it, it needs to be hosted. If you ask Deep Sea Fauna to host your site, we provide different tiers based on levels of support needed.

If hosting payment is interrupted, your site is removed from our server; however, you keep client portal access to download your files for 90 days, and you are always welcome to restart hosting with us.

Yes. A non-refundable deposit of $125 is required to sign your agreement and begin any work. For Starter sites, the balance is due at go-live. For other site types, milestone-based payment schedules will be documented in your agreement. We accept bank transfer and major credit cards right through your client portal.

Our clients are individuals and organization owners who do not have time to become their own IT department. As long as we host your site, we make every effort to fulfill support requests that take under 30 minutes and do not require new design decisions: quick copy tweaks, change an image, fix a link, or resolve a form issue.

Anything that needs new build work or new decisions, such as adding new components, integrating with external systems, sourcing new photography, or a net-new feature, is quoted separately as a change order. We document this upfront so our expectations stay aligned. Read more on Services.

With a company like GoDaddy, or Squarespace, you basically rent a template, and get help from the provider if something is wrong technically with the template's functionality. You are on your own for strategy and aesthetics. If you decide to change providers, you cannot take your site with you; leaving you to build it again somewhere else.

Deep Sea Fauna delivers custom sites distinctly reflecting you and your business. You own your site and you can take it to another provider any time after your final payment. When we host your site, you'll have a direct line to the team that built it. Small support requests under 30 minutes that do not require new design decisions are always in scope.

A discovery call (usually about 30 minutes) will confirm fit, goals, timeline, and rough scope. We will send you an estimate with specifics outlined. Accept the estimate or suggest changes and after your matching agreement is ready for you to sign digitally. Once signed you will have access to make your initial payment, $125 non-refundable, for us to begin work. When initial payment is received you will be asked to complete an intake form (brand assets, tone, copy, and content priorities etc.). Soon after you complete it we will send you preliminary site concepts for you to evaluate. This process is dependent on many factors; we commit to providing visual concepts within two weeks of receiving your intake form.

Project timeframes are dependent on many factors. On average, standard site projects take 4 to 8 weeks from kickoff to go-live. Timeframes and milestones will be explicit in your signed agreement.

Your agreement must be signed and initial payment must be made to officially kick off your project.

During the process there will be two specific revision rounds. This means your client portal will be open for you to pin comments to your draft site pages twice. When the first review window closes, we will make your requested changes and open it back up for your second and final review. Structural changes can be requested after the second review but may be out of scope depending on the effort needed to make them.

Yes. We work remotely across the United States. Unless otherwise arranged, all touchpoints happen by video call.

Clients supply draft copy that we might lightly edit for web readability, headings, and SEO. We also provide copywriting for page content or blogs as a service, scoped separately.

If clients do not provide images to use, we can help find free imagery or provide licensed stock where appropriate, scoped separately. We do not offer photography as a service.

New pages after launch are quoted as a change order. A single informational page added is a smaller scope than a new page with a new component. We are happy to make your site just what you need, so please just ask!

If you have custom code you want to use, we can work with it; however, we do not provide services if your site is hosted on a template-builder site like GoDaddy or Squarespace.

We want you to be thrilled with your site. Two revision rounds are included so you can steer the design before launch. If you're not completely satisfied with your site by scheduled go-live we will refund your money, minus any non-refundable deposit.

Yes. Deep Sea Fauna carries general liability and professional liability insurance. A certificate of insurance (COI) is available on request for organizations that need it for vendor onboarding or grant documentation.

We are committed to WCAG 2.1 Level AA accessibility standards and presenting a positive experience for all site visitors. WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, an international standard published by the W3C. "AA" is the middle tier and means your site works for people with visual, hearing, motor, and cognitive disabilities. In other words: your text is readable against its background, your site works with a keyboard, screen readers can parse it, and videos have captions.

Yes. Courts have consistently held that websites must comply with the ADA, and demand letters have increased significantly since 2020. Lawsuits don't require you to be a large company, you just need an inaccessible website. Read more about ADA web accessibility lawsuits.

No. Overlays like AccessiBe and UserWay are JavaScript plugins that attempt to fix accessibility problems automatically. The W3C, the National Federation of the Blind, and most accessibility professionals have stated these tools do not make a site WCAG compliant and can actually make it harder for screen-reader users to navigate. The only reliable fix is building the underlying code correctly. Even templated sites through GoDaddy or Squarespace can fail accessibility audits.

No, and no one can. Search results depend on competition, credibility factors, content quality, and domain history, and more. We guarantee: correct technical implementation, structured data that passes Google's Rich Results Test, and Lighthouse performance, accessibility, and application of best-practices with regular and consistent monitoring and applied fixes.

Every site we deliver includes technical SEO appropriate to your tier: clean HTML, fast delivery, indexable pages, baseline structured data, and launch checks. That is not the same as an ongoing authority program aimed at competitive visibility in Google and in AI-driven answers.

The SEO Authority package is offered as flat-cost bundles for technical foundation, monitoring, content, and expansion work. It targets organic search and AI surfaces (AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and similar—sometimes called AEO or GEO). It typically includes: entity and name-address-phone consistency; expanded JSON-LD where it helps; Google Business Profile alignment recommendations; citation and internal-linking review; llms.txt and signals for AI crawlers; and reporting with prioritized next steps.

Authority work is priced separately from your build. Current bundles are Bundle 1: Technical foundation ($800 one time), Bundle 2: Monitoring and reporting retainer ($200 per month), Bundle 3: Content engine ($400 per month), and Bundle 4: Competitive strategy and expansion ($100 per month, plus $200 for each additional landing page). See SEO Authority pricing. Read more on Services.

Yes. Getting your organization surfaced by AI tools is increasingly important. It involves entity consistency (describing your organization the same way everywhere), structured data, and deploying a llms.txt file that AI crawlers can read.

Ongoing work is part of our SEO Authority package; every build includes appropriate technical hooks but a full authority program is scoped separately. Read more about AI search.

You will have access to your site files upon final payment, and you own them. We hope you keep your site hosted at Deep Sea Fauna; but you are always free to move your files to any host you choose.

Hosting with Deep Sea Fauna varies depending on the complexity of your site and whether you pay monthly or annually.

If you prefer to host elsewhere, standard Apache shared hosting with cPanel and file upload access is enough for Starter and most Standard sites.

Yes, we build a basic authenticated content management system for you to easily update text and images on all our site builds. More complicated builds require more complex content management systems and may be scoped separately.