Nothing reaches your client until you've signed it off.

1. 01

   Brief

   Send what you have — the brief and the designs, or the brief and a direction. A fixed scope comes back within 48 hours: what's included, what isn't, what it costs, and when it lands. Anything the brief left open comes back as a named question, not a quiet assumption baked into the number.

2. 02

   NDA and SOW

   The NDA is signed before anything sensitive moves. The SOW records the scope you agreed — template count, CMS, integrations, turnaround. It is the document any later change gets measured against.

3. 03

   Build

   Hand-coded in Next.js or Astro, chosen for the job rather than out of habit. No page builder, no bought theme. A performance and accessibility budget is set at the start and held to.

4. 04

   Staging

   A live URL from week one, on a neutral domain. Open it on your own devices, send it to whoever needs to see it, leave comments against what you're looking at. Nothing is a surprise at the end.

5. 05

   Sign-off and handover

   You approve, and it ships under your name. The repo transfers clean — squashed to a single commit under a neutral identity, no studio name in the history, the config, or the metadata. The Lighthouse report and the accessibility audit go in the box.

What ships with every build

Performance report — the Lighthouse run, saved with the handover.

Accessibility audit — WCAG 2.2 AA, tested with a screen reader, not just a scanner.

SEO record — meta, schema, sitemap. Documented, not guessed at.

30-day warranty — anything that doesn't do what the SOW said, fixed free.

A change gets priced, not absorbed.

Revisions are expected and two rounds are included. A change of scope is a different thing — a new template, a CMS the brief didn't mention, a direction change after sign-off. Those get a change note: what's changing, what it costs, what it does to the date. Nothing moves until you say yes in writing.

This isn't a defence. It's the reason a fixed quote can be fixed at all.