About
Hi, I'm Amber.
I'm Sirocco Innovations, working out of Richmond, Virginia. I answer the emails, write the words, build the pages, and hand the finished site over. Nobody else picks it up halfway.
I grew up in Virginia, served in the Navy, and came out of college with a computer science degree. Now I build websites by hand for trades and small service businesses.
How I ended up doing this
Short version: good businesses kept turning up with bad websites.
I built my first sites in college, for family members who needed one and had nobody to ask. What turned it into a business was noticing the same thing over and over.
Painters, cleaners, plumbers. Businesses with years of happy customers behind them, and a website that loaded slowly, fell apart on a phone, and didn't say what city they worked in. Usually on a monthly subscription.
A page builder is an easy thing to sign up for, and it does get you online. It's just not much good at the parts that matter most, being found and working properly on a phone. That takes about a week to put right, and it's the part of this I like most.
The other half of it is that getting set up online shouldn't cost much to begin with. A business just starting out, or one that's run on word of mouth for years, shouldn't need a big budget to have somewhere to send people.
It's more or less the same job it was then. Somebody needs a website and doesn't know who to ask.
How I work
Short version: plainly, and without wasting your time.
-
I look before I quote
I read your current site and check what you show up for first. If a new website isn't what you need, that's cheap for you to hear and easy for me to say.
-
Facts get checked, not remembered
Your license number, service area, hours, reviews. A site that says something slightly untrue about you is worse than no site at all.
-
No jargon, and meetings only when they save time
Short emails and plain language, and I won't pretend something is complicated in order to charge you for it. The exception is updating your domain DNS or getting your site connected to Google, where fifteen minutes together beats a week of email.
-
Plain files, not a platform
No page builder, no plugins, nothing to keep patched. That's why these load fast and why they don't break on their own.
Why the prices look low
People ask. A five page website is about a week of work. Agencies quoting several thousand usually aren't gouging anyone: they have an office, a salesperson, a project manager and a designer to pay before anyone writes a line of code.
I have none of that. I'd rather build a lot of small sites properly, at a price a working business can approve without a second thought, than a handful of expensive ones.
The company
Sirocco Innovations LLC
A Virginia limited liability company. Everything here is done under that name, invoices included, and the registered address is at the bottom of every page.
Say hello
If you've got this far you may as well email me. Send your business name and I'll take a look at what you've got now.