For years I have noticed a gap, and I have only lately found the words for it.
If you run a business and you need a website, you have two real options, and neither one quite fits.
The first is the template. Thirty dollars a month, a drag-and-drop builder, an afternoon of your own time. It is honestly good value, and it will get you online. What it will not do is make you look like yourself, because it is the same product four million other businesses bought, and the point of it was that it asked nothing of you.
The second is the agency. Ten, twenty, fifty thousand dollars, a discovery phase, a strategy deck, a few people standing between you and whoever is doing the actual work. You will get something good. You will also pay for parts you did not need, because an agency carries an office and a payroll, and that has to be covered somewhere.
Between the two there is not much. Which is strange, because between the two is nearly every business I have met. The welder with thirty years behind him. The salon. The clinic. The concrete outfit. People with real work and real money who mostly need someone to tell them, plainly, that they do not need half of what they are being offered.
That middle is where I want to work. Studio-grade work, done by the person you actually talk to, at a price an owner can say yes to. No account manager. No long workshop. The first thing I will do is tell you what you can skip.
It is not a clever idea. It is the plain one. I keep expecting to find more company out here, and mostly I don't.