A marketing site that explains what you actually built.

Usually the message, and it costs nothing to find out first. A plain site that says something specific converts. A polished one that could belong to any company in the category does not, and a redesign only makes the same argument look better. The test is whether a stranger can read the homepage and say who the product is for and what it replaces. If they can, the site is not the problem and the project is a rewrite rather than a rebuild.

Use a template if you need to look credible next week and the words matter more than the structure. Templates are cheap and fast, and the argument on the page is still yours to write. Webflow and Framer give strong design control and less control over what the page structure does. A custom build earns its cost only when you need pages that rank, output an AI crawler can read, and a publishing surface you own. Most seed-stage companies do not need one yet.

Often yes, and Better Marketing builds on one, so this is not a defense of hand-coding. An AI builder produces a working site quickly and it does not decide what the site should argue, which is the part that takes longest and matters most. The second gap is what the build outputs, since many generated sites render in the browser and are invisible to AI crawlers. If the positioning is settled and someone can check the raw HTML, build it yourself.

Better Marketing writes it, out of material that comes from you. There is a session at the start where we pull the argument out of the founder: who this is for, what it replaces, what you rejected and why. We write from that conversation rather than from a brief, because a site written from a brief reads like every other site in the category. You approve every line. What we will not do is invent a position you do not believe, because you have to say it on sales calls afterwards.

Some of it has to be built in and some can genuinely wait. The structural half cannot be retrofitted cheaply: how pages are organized, what each page is allowed to be about, whether there is anywhere to publish, and whether the HTML exists before JavaScript runs. The content half, which is most of the ongoing work, starts after launch and never stops. Agencies that sell SEO as a separate phase are usually selling the second half only, and the first half is what causes rebuilds.

Google can, eventually, and ChatGPT largely cannot. Googlebot runs JavaScript on a second pass, so a React site that renders in the browser is usually indexed in the end. GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot mostly do not run JavaScript, so they receive a near-empty file and have nothing to quote. The fix is prerendering every route to real HTML at build time, which Better Marketing does on every site it builds. There is no visible symptom until someone views the raw HTML.

Map every existing URL to its replacement before launch, and keep the address unchanged on any page that already earns traffic. A redesign damages rankings when pages quietly change address and links from elsewhere start pointing at nothing. The failure that goes unnoticed longest is not URLs, it is metadata and structured data, which frequently do not survive a platform change and are missed for months. Better Marketing checks the served HTML after launch rather than the preview, because the two are different documents.

Six to ten weeks for a marketing site of eight to fifteen pages. Design and build take three to four weeks of that. The rest is settling the positioning and gathering proof, which is where projects actually slow down, because a site cannot be designed around an argument nobody has decided yet. Avenue 7 Media went live in six weeks and saw three times the inbound afterwards. Better Marketing will not commit to a launch date before the positioning is scoped.

Less than most founders expect. A clear sense of who you are selling to, access to two or three customers or prospects we can talk to, whatever proof exists even if it is thin, and one person who can make decisions without a committee. What you do not need is finished copy, a brand guide or a sitemap, because those are outputs rather than inputs. Founders who arrive with a fully written site usually spend the first fortnight unwinding it.

No. Better Marketing builds the marketing site. Better Software, the sister company, builds product. They are opposite problems: a marketing site is a persuasion job with an engineering constraint, and a product is an engineering job with a persuasion constraint. Agencies that claim both usually staff one properly and subcontract the other. If you need both, we will say so and introduce you rather than stretching the scope to fit what you came in asking for. Stretched scope is how a marketing site ends up built by people who would rather be building software.