WordPress, Statamic, and EmDash. Three CMSs, one philosophy: hand-coded, fast, and easy for you to manage. WordPress when you need the biggest ecosystem on the planet. Statamic when you want a clean, flat-file Laravel CMS with an admin panel your team will actually enjoy using. EmDash when you want a modern TypeScript stack built on Astro and running on Cloudflare's edge. I'm not married to any of them. I pick the one that fits your project, not the one I happen to know.
Depends on what you need. WordPress makes sense if you rely on specific plugins, need WooCommerce, or want a platform any developer on earth can pick up later. Statamic is great for marketing sites and content-heavy sites that need to be fast, secure, and version-controlled, with no database to babysit. EmDash is the new kid: built by Cloudflare, Astro-native, serverless, and designed to work with AI agents out of the box. It's still young, so I'll tell you straight up whether it's ready for your project or whether you're better off on something more established. We'll figure it out on the discovery call.
Because they're slow, bloated, and generate garbage code. Every Midcoast Works site is hand-coded on a performance-first stack, whether that's WordPress, Statamic, or EmDash. Clean, maintainable, and stupid fast. Page builders add hundreds of kilobytes of unused CSS and JavaScript that tank your Core Web Vitals and make your site feel like it's loading through a wet paper towel. We skip all of that.
Development itself takes 1 to 2 weeks. That's not a typo. The thing that drags projects out is everything around the code. If you show up with your copy written, your assets ready, and your feedback on time, we can have you live stupid fast. If you want us to handle the content, build out the creative direction, and go back and forth on revisions, that adds time, but it's time well spent. What we won't do is let a project sit in limbo for months because someone went ghost on approvals. We move fast. If you move fast too, you'll have a site before your competitors finish their next agency kickoff call.
Websites start at $3,333 for up to 5 pages, a contact form that actually lands in your inbox (not spam), and SEO fundamentals done right: meta titles, clean headings, a sitemap, and fast load times. Everything a small business actually needs, nothing it doesn't. Need more room? $7,777 gets you up to 14 pages with full SEO baked in from day one and configured properly (not just installed and ignored), plus 1 month of post-launch support. Every build is custom on WordPress, Statamic, or EmDash. No templates, no marketplace themes. And we build your homepage for free before you commit a dollar, so you can see exactly what you're getting.
Absolutely. We're based in Chicago but work remotely with clients worldwide. The entire process, from discovery to design to build to launch, happens over video calls, email, and async communication. Geography is irrelevant when the WiFi works.
We build your homepage before you pay anything beyond the discovery call. Live HTML. Not a static mockup, not a Figma file you have to squint at. Real code with real hover effects and real animations. If you love it, a 10% deposit kicks off the full build. If you hate it, keep the homepage, no invoice, no guilt trip. We're that confident in our work.
If you're manually copying data between apps, sending follow-ups by hand, or doing literally anything a robot could do better, then yes, you need it. We connect your tools via Make or Zapier, build intelligent pipelines that trigger actions automatically, and integrate LLMs directly into your existing systems. You get your time back. Your software gets smarter. Starting at $2,222.
Because you get the person who writes the code, makes the decisions, and ships the work. Not an account manager playing telephone between you and an outsourced dev team. No nine-person Zoom calls to decide on a button color. No "let me loop in the team." Midcoast Works is small on purpose. That means faster decisions, better communication, obsessive attention to detail, and nobody hiding behind a process. Plus, I use AI tools to work at a pace that most agencies can't match. You're not getting less by working with one person. You're getting someone who ships faster because there's nobody in the way.
Depends on the platform. On WordPress: Timber (Twig templating) and Advanced Custom Fields, with custom PHP. On Statamic: Laravel under the hood, Antlers or Blade templates, and flat-file content that lives in Git. On EmDash: TypeScript and Astro, deployed on Cloudflare. Across all of them: hand-written HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with no page builder plugins, no theme frameworks, and no bloat. Cloudflare for CDN and security. Zapier and Make for automation workflows. GA4 and Google Tag Manager for analytics. Everything is chosen for performance and maintainability, not because it was easy to install.
Probably. Slow site, broken plugins, security issues, "my last developer disappeared" emergencies. We've seen it all, on WordPress, Statamic, and more. Our hourly freelance rate is $99/hr with no long-term contract required. We'll tell you straight up whether it's worth fixing or if you'd be better off rebuilding.
Yes. If you're tired of plugin updates, security patches, and a database that keeps getting slower, moving to Statamic or EmDash can be a real upgrade. We'll move your content, preserve your URLs and redirects so you don't lose rankings, and rebuild the front end clean. And if WordPress is still the right call for you, we'll say so.
We focus on technical SEO, the stuff 90% of agencies skip. Site architecture, crawlability, indexation, schema markup, Core Web Vitals, server response times, image rendering, script execution. We make the numbers green. This isn't keyword stuffing and blog posts about nothing. It's engineering your site so Google (and AI search engines) can actually find, read, and rank your content. Starts at $2,222 for an audit, $999/mo for ongoing optimization.
You can. And if all you need is a basic landing page, you probably should. But if you need a site that performs, converts, ranks in search, handles real traffic, stays secure, and doesn't fall apart in six months, AI alone isn't going to get you there. AI is a tool. I use it every day. It makes me faster. But it doesn't replace knowing how to structure a database, debug a production server, or figure out why your funnel is leaking money at step 3. That's the part you're paying for.