Questions about your website, answered

A small-business website from us typically costs $2,000 to $5,000. Larger sites with booking, payments, or many pages run $8,000 to $15,000 or more. The price depends on the number of pages, the features you need, and how much of the writing we do for you. After a 30-minute call we send a written quote for the whole job, so you know the number before we start.

Yes. Your domain is registered in your name, and the content, photos, and design we create for you are yours. If you ever move on, we hand over everything you need to take the site with you.

Google Maps listings come from your Google Business Profile, not from your website alone. We set up or clean up the profile, make sure your name, address, and phone number match your site exactly, and link the two. Reviews matter too, so we'll show you a simple way to ask happy customers for one.

Your Google Business Profile is the listing that shows on Google Maps and in the local results box, with your hours, reviews, and photos. Your website is where people go next to decide whether to call you. You need both, and they should agree with each other. We set up both as one job.

Yes. Local SEO is built into every site we make: page titles and copy written around what Charlottesville customers actually search, structured data that tells Google who you are and where you are, fast load times on phones, and a Google Business Profile that matches your site. The goal is simple: show up when someone nearby searches for what you do, and get the call.

Yes. Every site comes with an editor, so you can change text, photos, hours, and blog posts without calling us. If you'd rather not, send us the change and we'll make it. Many clients do a bit of both.

It depends on what's underneath. If the site is built on a solid platform and just looks dated, a redesign is faster and cheaper. If it's slow, insecure, or hard to update, starting fresh on a modern platform usually costs less over a few years. We'll look at it and tell you which, before you spend anything.

Yes. We host and manage websites for local businesses, including backups, security updates, and uptime monitoring. When something goes wrong, you call us and we fix it. No support tickets, no offshore help desk.

Core, theme, and plugin updates, security patches, regular backups, and a check that everything still works after each update. We also handle small content changes and fixes. Most WordPress problems come from skipped updates, so this is the cheapest insurance your site can have.

Yes. We build appointment booking, event registration, and online payments into websites, connected to the calendar and payment tools you already use. Customers book and pay without calling, and the details land where your staff already works.

Yes, and we do it often. We start by getting access to your domain, hosting, and site, then review the code and plugins and tell you what we find. From there we take over updates and fixes. You don't need to rebuild unless it's genuinely the better option.

The usual causes are oversized images, too many plugins, cheap shared hosting, and code that loads everything on every page. We measure the site against Google's Core Web Vitals, fix the biggest problems first, and move it to better hosting if that's the bottleneck. Speed affects both your Google ranking and whether visitors stay.

Yes. Flying Dog Media offers AI consulting from our office at 240 West Main Street, focused on small and mid-sized businesses in Charlottesville, the Piedmont, and the rest of Virginia. We'll sit down with you, in person if you're local, map how your business runs, and find where AI actually saves time. You get a written recommendation and a fixed-fee proposal, not a $50k discovery deck.

Both, honestly. Every business should use ChatGPT or Claude for one-off work like drafting, brainstorming, and summarizing documents. You hire an AI agency when you want something repeatable that runs without you: the prompts, the connections to your existing tools, the guardrails, and the ongoing tuning. ChatGPT is the calculator. We build the spreadsheet.

Usually a focused automation that takes 5 to 10 hours a week of repetitive work off someone's plate. Think drafting follow-up emails, pulling data out of PDFs, summarizing meeting notes, sorting inbound leads, and tagging support tickets. Less science fiction, more boring leverage. The win isn't "we deployed AI." The win is the owner getting Friday afternoons back.

It's connecting AI to the tools you already use, like Gmail, Slack, Airtable, Google Sheets, Zoom, or your CRM, so routine tasks happen on their own. For example, when a new lead comes in, AI summarizes it, tags it, and adds it to your CRM, and a follow-up email is waiting in your drafts for one click. You review the result instead of doing the busywork.

Yes. We build assistants trained on your own services, hours, and FAQs that answer customers day and night and pass leads straight to your inbox. You can try one right now: Scout, in the corner of our homepage. We can also put an assistant inside Slack, Teams, or a client portal, or build one only your staff can see.

AI strategy consulting is the step before the build: a structured look at how your business runs to find where AI fits, where it doesn't, and what to do first. You need it if you're not sure where to start, if AI tools you've tried fizzled, or if you want a written roadmap before spending on implementation. We offer it as a short standalone engagement or as the first phase of a build.

Your data stays yours. We use privacy-aware designs, tightly scoped API keys, and clear contract terms about what gets sent to which AI provider. For regulated fields like law, healthcare, and financial services, we design around the relevant compliance rules from day one. We don't train models on your data, and we never share it across clients.

Flying Dog Media builds AI for law firms, from solo practitioners to mid-sized firms. We focus on the unglamorous but valuable work: intake automation, document summaries, conflict checks, scheduling, client portals, and AI-assisted research that respects attorney-client privilege. Every system is designed around the confidentiality and ethics rules your bar association cares about.

Yes, and it's one of our most-requested builds. A good intake assistant qualifies prospective clients, gathers the facts a paralegal would otherwise spend 15 minutes collecting, books the consultation, and hands the attorney a clean summary before the first call. A bad one sounds like a sales bot. We build the good kind.

The most useful examples are practical: scheduling and reminders that cut no-shows, personalized recall messages drafted from your patient list, insurance verification follow-up, automatic review requests after visits, and an internal search tool that lets staff find notes or treatment plans by asking a question instead of clicking through tabs.

Most small-business websites take 2 to 4 weeks from the first call to launch. The biggest variable is content: if your copy and photos are ready, we move fast. You get a schedule up front and can watch the site take shape as we build it.

No. Projects are quoted at a fixed price after a 30-minute call, so you know the full cost before work starts. The quote covers the whole job, and if the scope changes, we agree on the new number in writing first.

It depends on scope. Targeted automations and AI assistants typically cost $5,000 to $20,000 as a fixed-fee project. Larger systems with several integrations and ongoing workflows run $25,000 to $75,000 or more. We give you a number before you commit, and we don't bill by the hour for discovery calls. If your budget is smaller, we'll tell you honestly whether AI is the right move or whether a better spreadsheet would solve the problem.

A focused automation or AI assistant usually ships in 4 to 8 weeks. Larger systems take 2 to 4 months. You get a phased plan up front (discovery, design, build, launch, and tuning) so you know what ships when.

Our office is at 240 West Main Street, Ste 100-V6, in downtown Charlottesville. If you're local, we're happy to meet in person; otherwise a video call works just as well. You can also call us at (434) 989-2077.

Flying Dog Media has been building websites and software for more than 30 years. Some of our clients have worked with us for many years, and most stay on for hosting and support after launch.

You work directly with Jim Bain, our founder, and the small team that builds your project. The person who plans your site is the person who builds and supports it. You won't be handed off to an account manager.

Yes. Most of our clients are in Charlottesville, Albemarle County, and Central Virginia, but we work with businesses across Virginia and the rest of the country too. Everything except the in-person coffee works remotely.