Answers, Guides & Playbooks

A signed proposal triggers three things the same day: your portal account is created, kickoff is scheduled, and the intake questionnaire goes out. Kickoff normally lands five to ten business days later, which gives both sides time to gather assets and access. Bring logo files, brand guidelines, analytics access, and a short list of the pages you consider critical.

Every engagement gets a named strategist who owns the relationship and a delivery lead who owns the build. Designers, engineers, and SEO specialists rotate in by phase, but those two people do not change. All communication runs through the portal, so nothing depends on a single inbox. Your strategist can make decisions inside the signed scope without escalating.

DW Essential typically goes live in three to five weeks. DW Business OS runs six to ten weeks depending on content readiness and how much data has to migrate out of your old tools. DW Industry Pro and DW Enterprise are phased, so the first modules go live before the last ones are configured. The biggest schedule variable is content — launches stall on copy and approvals far more often than on engineering.

The portal holds projects, invoices, hosting status, analytics, requests, and documents in one place. You can check the stage of any project, pay an open invoice, file a request, and download signed contracts without emailing anyone. Analytics and uptime read live from the systems your site runs on, so nothing is a stale monthly snapshot.

Use New Request, choose a type — design, development, content, or reporting — and describe the outcome rather than the implementation. Requests are triaged within one business day and given a visible queue position. Small changes covered by a retainer are usually live within 48 hours; anything that expands scope gets a written estimate first.

Yes, and there is no per-seat charge. Roles are granular: an owner sees billing, a marketing manager sees analytics and files requests, a contractor can be scoped to a single project. Invitations expire after seven days and every action is written to an audit log.

Hosting covers the server, the CDN, SSL certificates, daily backups with 30-day retention, and a staging environment that mirrors production. We monitor uptime from multiple regions and patch the stack ourselves, so you are never asked to apply an update. Deploys land on staging first and promote to production in one click, and every deploy is reversible. If something breaks overnight, the rollback usually happens before you hear about it.

Yes. You keep the domain in your own registrar account and point nameservers, or a small set of records, at us. We never take custody of a domain and charge nothing to release one. Keeping the registrar under your own control is the safer default, and it means leaving is a decision you can execute yourself.

Pages and static assets are served from the CDN edge, so most of a spike hits cache instead of origin. Origin capacity scales inside your plan ceiling and we are alerted well before that ceiling is reached. Flag campaign launches a week ahead so we can pre-warm cache and raise limits.

For a normal launch we change only the records that serve the website: A, AAAA, the CNAME for www, and the CAA record used to issue SSL. Mail records — MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC — are carried across verbatim unless you ask us to change them. Before any cutover we export your full zone file into your vault so the previous state can be restored in minutes.

Almost always authentication, not wording. A domain needs an SPF record listing every service that sends on its behalf, DKIM signing enabled at the provider, and a DMARC policy that at minimum reports. Sending bulk campaigns from the same domain as your transactional mail erodes reputation over time, so use a dedicated subdomain. We audit all four as part of any hosting or SEO engagement.

Technical fixes register in days to weeks — indexation, crawl errors, speed, and structured data all move quickly. Content and authority take longer: expect the first real ranking movement at eight to twelve weeks and compounding gains from month four. A brand-new domain runs several months behind an established one doing identical work. Anyone promising ranked results in thirty days is describing paid traffic.

Four things, in order of leverage: matching search intent with the right page type, technical health so the page can be crawled and rendered, internal linking that concentrates authority on pages that earn revenue, and external links from sites that already have trust. Keyword density and word count are not on that list. Most sites we audit are losing to a competitor with weaker writing and better structure.

Only if each post answers something your buyers actually search for and links to a page that converts. Two hundred undifferentiated posts are worth less than twelve pages that own their query. We build commercial-intent pages first and supporting content second. The SEO work on DW Business OS and above includes the keyword and SERP research that decides which is which.

Every report opens with the three numbers that matter to your business — usually qualified leads, cost per lead, and revenue influenced — then explains what changed and why. Traffic and rankings appear as supporting evidence, not headlines. Each report closes with the work planned for the next thirty days and any decision we need from you. When a month goes badly the report says so and states the correction.

Because every platform counts differently. Ad platforms attribute a conversion to the click, GA4 attributes across a modeled path, and a CRM only counts what a human marked won. Server-side tracking also captures sessions that browser-level blockers hide from GA4, which usually pushes our totals higher. We reconcile against your CRM, because that is where revenue is actually recorded.

Yes. The portal exports any view to PDF on demand, and scheduled summaries can go weekly, monthly, or quarterly to any recipient list. DW Enterprise tenants from $1,500/mo get a live dashboard suitable for board reporting.

Project work bills in milestones — typically 40 percent at kickoff, 30 percent at design approval, and 30 percent at launch. Invoices appear in the portal on net-15 terms and can be paid by card or ACH from the same screen. Retainers bill on the first of the month and renew until cancelled. Nothing outside the signed scope is invoiced without written approval first.

Retainers need thirty days of written notice and carry no cancellation penalty. Pausing a project holds your production slot for up to sixty days; past that the work re-enters the schedule at the next opening. On cancellation you receive every asset produced to that point, source files included, and hosting can migrate to any provider you choose. We do not hold work hostage over a disputed invoice.

Your monthly rate is locked for the term of the agreement and setup is fixed at signature. If you add a module or a location, the change is quoted and approved before anything is switched on instead of surfacing on an invoice later. Published pricing is DW Essential $249/mo, DW Business OS $499/mo, DW Industry Pro $799/mo, and DW Enterprise from $1,500/mo. Setup is charged once, up front, and halved when you pay annually. Compare every plan →

Every credential sits in an encrypted vault, AES-256 at rest and in transit, granted by role rather than shared as a password. Nobody carries standing access to your production systems; access is issued for a task and expires. Multi-factor authentication is mandatory on every internal account.

Monitoring covers uptime, certificate expiry, dependency vulnerabilities, and unexpected file changes. A confirmed incident gets a named owner within fifteen minutes and a written notification to your primary contact the same day. Within five business days you receive a post-incident report covering cause, timeline, and the change that prevents a repeat.

File a request with the page URL, the current text, and the replacement text. Text-only edits inside a retainer are typically live within one business day. If a change needs new layout or new components it becomes design work and is quoted first.

Yes, wherever a CMS is part of the build. We define editable regions so content can change without anyone being able to break layout or typography. Your team gets a 45-minute training session and a short written guide filed in the vault. Structural changes still route through us so the design system stays intact.