A Website For Your Shop, Delivered By Friday.
No discovery call. No kickoff meeting. No mock-ups, no design committee, no rounds of revisions. One email in. One website out — in seventy-two hours flat.
For three decades the cost of putting a small trade business on the internet has trended sharply, and in only one direction. Where a plumber, an electrician, a roofer or a landscaping crew might once have paid a local sign-painter or a directory listing the equivalent of two service calls a year, the modern figure — quoted by web shops that demand discovery sessions, brand workshops, and bi-weekly status syncs — frequently exceeds four thousand dollars before a single line of code is written, and another four hundred a month thereafter to keep the lights on.
This newspaper takes the position that the entire arrangement has gone, as the trade itself might put it, upside down.
Torch is the modest correction we are proposing. You write us one email. Inside that email you put the name of the business, the services you offer, the cities or counties you cover, and — if you happen to have them — a couple of photographs of recent work. That is the discovery process. There is no second step that involves a calendar invitation.
From that email our workshop produces, within seventy-two hours, a real and custom website: a home page that actually reads like a member of your trade wrote it, individual service pages for the work you do, service-area pages for the towns you cover, a lead form that texts you the moment a customer fills it out, and your most recent Google reviews surfaced where a phone-bound customer can see them.
We email you a working preview. You keep it for one hundred and ninety-nine dollars a month. No setup fee, no contracts, no upfront figure with a comma in it. If you decide it is not for you, you reply to that same email and say so, and that is the cancellation procedure in full.
If you say yes within seven days of receiving your preview, the first month is on us. We will accept that as a sufficient demonstration of confidence in the work.
This being a first issue, we will keep the editorial brief. The remainder of the broadsheet sets out — in plain English, with no further ceremony — exactly how the process runs, what arrives in your inbox, what other shop owners have said about the result, and what it costs.
We hope you find it useful. And, when you are ready, we look forward to the email.