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Small business website design · Western Colorado

A professional website you actually own.

Custom websites for Western Colorado businesses—built for you, owned by you, and designed so you can keep them current yourself with AI instead of waiting on somebody else to change a phone number. Starting at $1,800.

Start a conversation See recent work

The problem

You shouldn't have to file a request to fix your own hours.

Small business websites often end up in one of two places: a rented builder that never quite feels like yours, or a custom site that requires contacting a developer for every change.

That means outdated hours, old photos, services you no longer offer, and little errors that stay online simply because fixing them is more trouble than they seem worth.

This service exists to change that. You should own the website your customers judge you by, and you should be able to update ordinary things when you notice they need updating.

What you get

A finished site, launched, and genuinely handed over.

Your site is designed for your business, built around what your customers actually need to find, and launched with the technical groundwork already in place.

Ownership

This is yours. All of it.

When the project ends, the website is yours—not something Hands On AI Lab lets you use.

The domain and hosting are in your name. Your contact form goes to you. Your source code lives in a repository your business owns.

The practical test is simple:

If you and I never spoke again, would anything break? The answer has to be no.

That is how these projects are built.

The source repository—usually GitHub—also records every version of the site. You do not need to become a developer or learn Git. You only need to know that the code is yours, changes are recoverable, and another competent developer can take over at any time.

The part nobody else does

Then I teach you to maintain it with AI.

This is where website development and the rest of Hands On AI Lab meet. Before the project ends, you are shown how to use a modern AI coding assistant such as Claude or Codex to make routine changes safely yourself.

  1. Ask for the change in plain words

    Examples like changing hours, replacing a photo, or adding a service can be described the same way you would describe them to a person.

  2. Look at it before anyone else can

    The change appears in a private preview first. Reviewing the preview is non-negotiable.

  3. Approve it deliberately

    Nothing goes live because an AI decided it was finished. It goes live because you reviewed it and approved it.

  4. Publish

    Once the change looks right, publish it.

  5. Know how to undo it

    Every version is recorded, and you will practice rolling back a change during the handoff.

  6. Know what belongs with a human

    Routine content changes are usually appropriate. Payments, customer data, login systems, or major structural changes deserve professional review.

AI coding assistants can misunderstand requests, change more than you asked, or confidently claim something worked when it did not. That is why the workflow above always keeps a human between the AI and the live website.

This is the same principle behind everything else Hands On AI Lab teaches: keep the human in the loop.

See how that principle is taught in workshops

How a project runs

Seven steps, and you know which one you are on.

  1. Business discovery

    We talk through what the business does, who its customers are, what they need from the site, and what the site needs to accomplish.

  2. Content and fact gathering

    Services, service areas, hours, contact information, photos, credentials, and any facts that need verification.

  3. Design and development

    The site is designed and built for real screens and real devices, including phones.

  4. Review and revision

    You review the working site and tell me what needs to change. Revisions are expected.

  5. Launch

    Domain, hosting, forms, redirects, analytics, and search-engine basics are checked and put into production.

  6. Ownership handoff

    Accounts, source repository, passwords, and documentation are transferred into your control.

  7. Hands-on AI maintenance orientation

    You make a real change to your own site with AI while I am there to guide you through the entire process.

Pricing

Starting at $1,800.

  • That covers a normal small business website: a handful of pages, custom design, a contact route, launch, technical SEO groundwork, ownership handover, and the AI maintenance orientation
  • Most sites of this size run on a hosting platform's free tier, so the ongoing cost is usually just your domain name—generally $10 to $25 a year, depending on the registrar
  • What a particular build needs depends on the platform and the features involved. If yours needs a paid tier, you are told before work begins, not after
  • Quoted in writing before anything starts. No hourly surprises

Scoped separately

Some things genuinely cost more.

  • Online stores and payment processing
  • Booking, scheduling, or availability systems
  • Customer accounts and logins
  • Databases and custom admin tools
  • Large migrations from an existing site with substantial content
  • Integrations with software you already run
  • Unusually large page counts or ongoing content production
  • Application-like functionality of any kind

Recent work

Three live sites, three genuinely different problems.

Every screenshot below is the real, current site. No device mockups, no invented brands, no borrowed portfolios.

The Rock Royalty homepage, showing the headline Done once. Done right. over a dark layout with a portrait of the owner in a branded work shirt

Remodeling & repair · Garfield County, CO

Rock Royalty

An owner-operated remodeling and repair business replacing a rented website builder. Same domain, new site, and a small custom admin so the owner can change his own hours, photographs, and services without calling anybody.

  • Runs entirely in the client's own Cloudflare account
  • Custom admin for contact details, photos, and services
  • Search intent handled without claims the business cannot make
Read the full story View live site
The Magnolia Slumber Party Rental homepage, showing white canvas teepees with lavender garlands and the headline We bring the whole party to your living room

Party rentals · Metropolis, IL

Magnolia Slumber Party Rental

A business running entirely out of a Facebook page, with no website and no way to check a date. The build added a real booking system, an admin to run it from, and an interactive page where a customer designs the sleepover they are picturing and sends it along with the enquiry.

  • Availability calendar and enquiry flow on a real database
  • Admin for confirming, rescheduling, and blocking dates
  • Built from documented research, with unverified facts left off
Read the full story View live site
The Dear Future Overlords homepage, a green terminal-styled layout with large pixel lettering and two cartoon characters framing the page

Podcast · Christopher's own project

Dear Future Overlords

Christopher's own podcast, and the place he gets to be least sensible. A deliberately strange archive-terminal design over an ordinary problem: a growing catalogue of seasons, series, and episodes that has to stay navigable as it grows.

  • Season, series, and episode hierarchy on a shared content layer
  • Crawler policy generated from a registry and checked automatically
  • Included here as a design range sample, not as client work
View live site

Service area

Western Colorado, mostly in person.

Hands On AI Lab is based on Colorado's Western Slope and works with small businesses in Rifle, Silt, New Castle, Glenwood Springs, Carbondale, Parachute, Battlement Mesa, Grand Junction, and surrounding communities.

Being local helps. Discovery is often better in the business itself, photographs are easier to gather properly, and the final AI handoff works especially well sitting beside someone.

Projects outside the area are possible—Magnolia Slumber Party Rental is in Illinois—but Western Colorado is the primary service area.

Straight answers

The questions people actually ask.

Do I own the website?

Yes. The domain, hosting, live site, and source code are yours. Nothing depends on continuing to work with Hands On AI Lab.

What does it cost to run after launch?

Many small-business sites can run on a free hosting tier, leaving the domain name as the main recurring cost—often roughly $10–$25 per year. If your project requires paid hosting or another subscription, that is identified before work begins.

Why does $1,800 not cover every website?

Because $1,800 is the starting price for a normal small-business site. Ecommerce, databases, booking systems, customer logins, large migrations, and application-like features require additional work and are quoted separately.

Can I really update the site myself with AI?

For routine changes such as wording, hours, prices, photos, and services, yes. You will be shown how to preview, review, approve, publish, and undo changes safely before the project ends.

What if I don't want to touch it at all?

That is completely fine. Ownership gives you the option to maintain the site yourself; it does not obligate you to. Future changes can still be quoted as needed. The point of the handover is that you have the option, not that you are obliged to use it.

I already have a website. Is it worth replacing?

Sometimes not. If your current site works well and you can maintain it, keeping it may be the better answer.

Will my existing links and search ranking survive?

Existing URLs should be preserved where practical, and redirects are used when pages move so old links continue pointing visitors and search engines to the correct place.

How long does it take?

The build itself can move quickly. Timing usually depends more on how fast content, photos, facts, and review decisions are provided.

Start here

Tell me about the business, not the website.

The first conversation is about what you do and who calls you. If a new website is not the thing that would actually help, I would rather say so early—there is no version of this where talking you into the wrong project ends well for either of us.

No deposit, no obligation, and no jargon in the first conversation.

Start a conversation
AI integration for businessWhen the website is fine and the bottleneck is somewhere in how the work gets done.AI classes & workshopsThe same principle, taught to a whole room: capability, with a human in the loop.Private AI helpNinety minutes on one task—including, often enough, a website task.