I build WordPress websites for B2B businesses that need to perform, not just look good.

I’ve been building websites since 1998. I’ve sat across from hundreds of business owners who’ve just received a proposal, and the conversation follows a pattern so consistent I could script it. They’ve been quoted somewhere between $8,000 and $15,000. They’ve decided that feels expensive but manageable. They’ve mentally allocated the budget, maybe set a timeline, and they’re ready to go.

I have been on both sides of hundreds of discovery calls. Running Chillybin since 2009, I have sat across from clients trying to figure out whether to trust us. Before that, I was a freelancer watching agencies oversell and underdeliver. And before that, I was building sites in 1998 when the entire concept of a “web agency” barely existed.

I’ve been asked about web design pricing more times than I can count. The question usually comes in one of two forms: a prospective client who’s just received a $1,200 quote from someone on Fiverr and a $22,000 quote from an agency and genuinely cannot understand why the gap exists, or a business owner who’s been burned before and wants to know what they should have paid.

I’ve introduced clients to other agencies more times than most people would expect. Sometimes we weren’t the right fit for the budget. Sometimes the client needed a capability we didn’t have. Sometimes I just knew a competitor would serve them better than we would, and I said so.

I have been running a web agency since 2009. Before that, I was building sites for clients from 2003, doing the same work without the letterhead. Sixteen years of scoping, building, launching, and then watching what happens after launch has given me a specific kind of education — one that does not come from courses or conferences. It comes from patterns.

There’s a pattern I keep seeing, and it’s consistent enough now that I’ve stopped being surprised by it. A company will happily approve a $20,000 website redesign. New look, new feel, a launch announcement on LinkedIn, maybe even a small celebration in the office. Everyone’s proud. The project gets a slide in the quarterly board…

The average website I look at in 2026 has been built, consciously or not, for a desktop user sitting at a desk with time to spare. Clean navigation, generous whitespace, hover states that work beautifully with a mouse. And somewhere in the analytics, a mobile traffic share sitting between 55% and 70%, with a bounce rate that would make a direct mail copywriter weep.

Earlier this year I had a discovery call with a business owner who wanted a website refresh. Typical brief. The site felt dated, the design hadn’t been touched in a few years, they wanted something more modern. We were maybe ten minutes into the conversation when I asked about their analytics.

Every Chinese New Year, the same thing happens. Businesses close for a few days. Teams rest. Families eat. And then, usually somewhere between the second and fifth day of the new year, the phones and the inboxes and the websites wake back up — all at once.

I spent the break between Christmas and New Year doing work that will never appear in a case study. No client will reference it in a testimonial. It won’t show up in a proposal or impress anyone on a discovery call. It was internal systems work, and it was some of the most valuable time I’ve spent in years.

I’ve been building websites since 1998. In that time I’ve watched the industry develop a reliable pattern: everyone ignores the infrastructure until the infrastructure ignores them back.

There is a version of this story I have seen dozens of times. A business gets a website built for a few thousand dollars. It looks reasonable. It loads. The team signs off on it and moves on. Three years later, nothing has changed — the site still loads, it still looks roughly the same, and it is still generating almost no enquiries. Nobody connects those two facts.