Questions people actually ask

Stoltzfus Web & Office charges seventy five dollars an hour, invoiced weekly while the job runs. There is no fixed price, no cap and no deposit. We will not put a total on a job before we have looked at it, because a produce stand and a construction outfit are not the same work and quoting them the same is how people end up unhappy.

A fixed price has to include the cost of everything that might go wrong, so the man whose job goes smoothly pays for the man whose job does not. Hourly means you pay for the work your job actually took. Invoicing weekly is what stops it drifting for a month before anybody sees a number, and it protects you as much as us.

We do not know until we have looked, and anybody who tells you a total before looking is guessing. What we can tell you is the rate, seventy five dollars an hour, and that you will see an invoice every week rather than one lump at the end. Ring 717-383-8139 and we will look at your site for nothing and tell you what we find.

No. There is no deposit and no money up front. The first invoice comes at the end of the first week of work, for the hours actually worked that week.

Yes, at the end of any week. You pay for the hours worked to that point and nothing else. There is no term to see out.

A three hour setup session at two hundred and twenty five dollars, which is the same seventy five an hour. We sit with you and whoever keeps your information up to date, go through what is on your site now, set up your own assistant account so your person can make changes, and get a first office job running if that is what you came for. Travel is charged on top and you are told what it comes to before a date is set.

Nothing is ever charged by Stoltzfus Web & Office for being available. There is no retainer and no support contract. You will never pay a monthly to us, and you will never be surprised by one. The assistant that lets your own person change the site is a subscription in your name, on your card, starting around twenty dollars a month. Anything you choose to add later, such as having the Office send text messages, carries its own monthly cost in your name. We tell you every one of those prices in the conversation, before you decide, rather than letting you find them at signup.

Your domain name, which is yours and usually costs under fifteen dollars a year bought at cost. The assistant subscription, around twenty dollars a month, in your name. If you want business email on your own domain, its price depends on the mail provider you pick, and we give you the current figure before you choose. Nothing to us, ever.

You ring and it is billed at the same seventy five an hour. There is no free first call, which we say plainly rather than pretending otherwise. If you would rather have us regularly you buy hours, and you can buy them ahead if that suits your books. That is paying for work, not paying to keep us on standby, and it is the difference between a job and a retainer.

Your domain is registered in your name. Your hosting, your forms and your assistant are all accounts in your name. You hold a copy of every login from the day it is made, and from sign-off the passwords, the two factor and the recovery details are yours alone. Every file that makes up the site sits in a folder on your own computer. Once you have signed off, if you never speak to Stoltzfus Web & Office again, then under normal conditions, with your domain renewed, the site keeps running and you can change it, move it, or hand it to somebody else without asking us anything.

Nothing happens to your website. That is the whole point. Nothing is switched off and nothing needs our permission, because none of it was ever in our name. Your domain still renews each year, in your name, the same as it always did. Most people in this trade cannot say that, which is exactly why it is worth asking every one of them.

You do, in your own name, on your own card. If a vendor currently holds yours, getting it back into your name is the first thing that has to happen and usually the thing that decides whether a job can start at all. It is the most common reason a website job stalls.

Yes, and it is part of the job rather than something you work out afterwards. Before we leave, the person you named does every task on the list themselves while we watch, on their own machine. Changing a price, a phone number, an opening time, a photograph or a paragraph. If they stumble, the instructions are wrong and we fix them on the spot.

During the build, yes, and on purpose. We hold the logins so a remote job does not mean ringing you for a code several times a day. Every account is in your name, you get a copy of every login and password as it is made, and at sign-off you change every password, take the two factor backup codes, and we come off every account while you watch.

It depends entirely on whether your email runs on the same domain name as your website, and that is the first thing we check. If your mail is somewhere else, moving the website cannot touch it. If it is on the same name, the mail becomes the gate: it gets proved working before the switch, and proved again afterwards from an outside address. Nothing is changed until there is a full backup and a written rollback with a time on it.

We cannot tell you which of those two you are without looking at your domain, and looking is free. Ring 717-383-8139 and we will find out.

No. Every address on your existing site is written into a redirect map and lands somewhere on the new one. Anything a customer bookmarked, anything another site linked to, and anything already in a search engine keeps working. That map is built from a page by page read of your current site, not guessed at.

They will say something about you whether you have prepared for it or not. These assistants do not hold a private file on your company. They read what is publicly written and build an answer out of it, with no way of telling what is current and what is eight years old. If the best material about you is a stale directory entry and one bad review, that is the answer somebody gets.

What we can do is make sure the true facts are written plainly, in a form a machine can read cleanly, and stated the same way everywhere it looks. That is part of every site we build and it is not sold separately.

No, and nobody can. There is no way to buy a place in those answers, no way to verify you have one, and no honest way to promise it. Anyone telling you otherwise is guessing with your money, the same as the people who used to promise a spot on page one.

What we do is narrower and actually deliverable. We make sure that when something does describe your business, it has correct, current, plainly written facts to work from rather than scraps. Whether it then recommends you is not ours to sell.

Plain finished sentences that answer a real question, and the machine-readable facts sitting behind the page that state your name, phone, hours, services and the area you work in. A page written as a list of half sentences and a picture gives it very little to work with.

It is the same reason a page reads well to a person. Nothing here is written for machines at the expense of the man reading it, and if the two ever pulled in different directions the man would win.

Not a shop we host. If you sell something, we wire the site to your own Stripe, Square or Shopify account so the money and the merchant account stay in your name. We never hold card data and we never host a cart. If what you need is a full shop with inventory behind it, that is outside what we do and we would rather tell you now than take your money and find out later.

Some of it, now. A vacation rental still hands its guests to the people who do booking for a living, the way Sharon Springs Vista sends its guests straight to Airbnb and Vrbo. For a trade business we build the Office: one system installed in your own account, with a login for you and your own people, your own database, and a page where a customer who asked for a visit can pick a time from your calendar. What we still turn down is public customer logins and membership sites, inventory systems, a real checkout or card data on the site, and anything holding health records or regulated financial information. You will know which side of that line your job sits on during the first call.

No. If you want a website and nothing else, that is what you get and nobody will bring it up again. The back office work is quoted as its own job every time, never folded into a website setup session and never assumed because you asked about a website.

Nothing gets signed at your kitchen table, and no unexplained paperwork ever appears. Before the first hour of work you get the scope, the rate, the weekly invoicing and short written terms, in plain words, and you say yes in writing. An email is fine. Every change after that is agreed the same way.

You send your web address, John rings you for a few minutes and asks nine questions, then we read your site from the outside and send you what we found. Placeholder text still live, dead buttons, pages nobody has opened in years, who your domain actually answers to, and whether moving it would touch your email.

There is no catch. It needs no login from you, nothing on your site is touched, and you keep the write up whether you hire us or not. Take it to whoever you like.

Stoltzfus Web & Office is in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. We work with businesses in Lebanon, Lancaster, Manheim, Harrisburg, Allentown and Scranton, and further out than that when the job suits it.

Most of the work is done remotely, which is why the list reaches as far as it does. Reading your site, building it, moving a domain and setting up your accounts all happen from here. What genuinely needs somebody in the room is the setup session and the handover, and where a visit makes sense, travel is charged on top of the job and you are told what it comes to before a date is set.

Ring 717-383-8139, or send your web address through the free site review form and John will ring you. Nothing is quoted on that first call and nothing is decided that day.