Questions about your website, answered

A small-business site from us typically runs $2,000–$5,000, and larger sites with booking, payments, or many pages run $8,000–$15,000+. 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.

Maps results come from your Google Business Profile, not your website alone. We set up or clean up the profile, make sure your name, address, and phone match your site exactly, and link the two. Reviews matter too: 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.

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.

You can get answers from ChatGPT yourself. What we build is the system around those answers: the prompts, the connections to your existing tools, the guardrails, and the ongoing tuning. If you have a one-off question, ChatGPT is great. If you want AI to do real work inside your business every day, you need a system.

Both, honestly. Every business should be using ChatGPT (or Claude) for ad-hoc work — writing drafts, brainstorming, summarizing documents. You hire an AI agency when you want something repeatable, integrated, and accountable: a system that runs without you, plugs into your existing tools, and gets better over time. ChatGPT is the calculator. An AI agency builds the spreadsheet.

Less science fiction, more boring leverage. AI for small business is usually a focused automation that replaces 5–10 hours a week of repetitive work — drafting follow-up emails, extracting data from PDFs, summarizing meeting notes, categorizing inbound leads, tagging support tickets. The win isn't "we deployed AI." The win is "the owner gets her Friday afternoons back."

AI workflow automation for small business means stringing together AI steps with the tools you already use — Gmail, Slack, Airtable, Google Sheets, Zoom, your CRM — so that mundane tasks happen on their own. A new lead arrives → AI summarizes it → it lands in your CRM enriched and tagged → a follow-up draft sits in your inbox waiting for one click. That's the shape of it.

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 for small business is the step before the build: a structured look at your operations to figure out where AI actually fits, where it doesn't, and what the order of operations should be. You need it if you're not sure where to start, if you've tried AI tools and they fizzled, or if you want a written roadmap before you spend on implementation. We offer it as a standalone short engagement or rolled into a build project.

Your data stays yours. We build with privacy-aware architectures, scoped API keys, and clear contractual boundaries about what gets sent to which AI provider. For regulated industries — law, healthcare, financial services — we design around the relevant compliance requirements from day one. We don't train models on your data and we don't 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 workflows: intake automation, document summarization, conflict checks, scheduling, client portals, and AI-assisted research that respects attorney-client privilege. Every system we build for a law firm is designed around the ethical and confidentiality requirements your bar association cares about.

Yes. AI chatbot for law firm intake is one of our most-requested builds. Done well, it qualifies prospective clients, gathers the facts a paralegal would otherwise spend 15 minutes collecting, schedules the consultation, and hands the lawyer a clean intake summary before the first call. Done poorly, it sounds like a sales bot. We build the first kind.

Concrete examples: AI scheduling and reminders that reduce no-shows, an AI assistant that drafts personalized recall messages from your patient list, automatic insurance verification follow-up, post-visit review request automation, and an internal AI search tool that lets your team find clinical notes or treatment plans by asking a question instead of clicking through tabs.

Most small-business sites take 2–4 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 see the site as we build it.

Projects are quoted as a fixed price after a 30-minute call, so you know the cost before work starts.

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

A focused automation or AI assistant usually ships in 4–8 weeks. Larger systems run 2–4 months. We share a phased plan upfront — discovery, design, build, launch, optimize — so you know what's shipping when and there are no surprises.

Our office is at 240 West Main Street, Suite 100, 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.