You get me. Not a ticket number.

Twenty years of watching the same things break

E-commerce, websites, social media, the lot. Long enough to have seen every fashion come and go twice, and long enough to know that the thing costing a small business its enquiries is almost never the exciting thing. It is a contact form nobody tested, a page that takes eleven seconds on a phone, an email setup that quietly drops invoices into spam.

Lately a lot of my time has gone on hacked sites. Someone phones on a Sunday because Google has put a red warning across their business, and there is a particular kind of satisfaction in taking that apart, finding the way in, closing it, and handing back something clean with an explanation they can actually follow. Compliance work has the same appeal. POPIA frightens people because nobody has ever explained it to them in ordinary words.

That is the honest reason this exists: I like fixing things, and I like the moment somebody realises the problem was findable all along.

Why this exists

Most small business owners know something is wrong with their website and have no way to find out what. The two options on offer are a free automated tool that produces a wall of red warnings nobody can act on, or an agency that wants a monthly retainer before it will tell you anything at all.

Neither answers the actual question, which is: what is costing me enquiries, what does it cost to fix, and can I do it myself? So that is what a report here says, finding by finding, with a rand figure against each one.

How I charge

Fixed prices, published, on a rate card I quote from rather than inventing a number for each client. A free check that runs ten tests instantly. Paid audits from R1,950 to R7,600 depending on how deep it goes. Repairs priced individually, so you can take the list to your own developer if you would rather.

There is no retainer you have to sign to get the report, and nothing in a report expires. If you read it, do the work yourself and never speak to me again, the report has done its job.

What I will not do

Four promises, and they are the ones that cost me work rather than win it.

• I will not invent a statistic. Every number in a report is something I measured or counted, on a date that is printed on it. No industry averages presented as your results, and no percentage improvements I cannot support.
• I will not guarantee a ranking. Nobody controls Google, and anybody promising a position is either guessing or lying. What I can promise is that you will know exactly what is wrong and what it costs.
• I will not touch anything without permission. Every check is passive, reading pages your site already serves, and public records anyone can look up. I do not log in, probe, or test anything. Where a paid audit needs access, I ask for it separately and in writing.
• I will not sell you a monthly plan you do not need. There is one, it costs R795, and it exists because websites drift. If a one-off fix is what you need, that is what I will quote.

An agency counts you. I know you.

At a bigger agency you are an account number in a system, handled by whoever is free that week, reported on in a slide deck nobody reads. That model works at scale. It is not what a business with one website and a real phone number needs.

I take this on as a personal project each time. One person, working with you directly, who will remember your business the next time you call and will tell you when something is not worth spending money on. Relationships rather than retainers. If that sounds old-fashioned, it is, and it is also why people come back.

The guarantee

If a paid audit does not find at least five specific, fixable problems worth acting on, you get your fee back in full. I have never had to pay it out, and the reason is not that I am clever, it is that almost every small business website has more than five.

Who this is not for

If you have an in-house developer who already reads Search Console every week, they will find most of this themselves.

This is for the business owner who suspects their website is quietly costing them customers, wants a straight answer from someone who has actually looked, and would like to be told which parts they can sort out over a weekend.