What This Is
Your website works. People find you. Forms submit. Nothing's on fire.
But it's tired. The design hasn't been touched since 2019. The copy was written before you pivoted. The blog hasn't been updated in a year. The mobile experience is a chore. You've been told you "need a redesign" by three different vendors who quoted you $25K for a slide deck.
Renaissance is the service for sites that still work but no longer represent you. It's a deliberate rebuild against what you've already built — not a tear-down, not a rescue, not a fresh start that loses your SEO equity and email archive.
Renaissance vs. Resurrection — Different Services
We get asked. Here's the distinction:
| | Resurrection | Renaissance | |--|--|--| | Starting condition | Broken, hacked, abandoned, or unmaintainable | Functional but dated | | Goal | Get to a state where ongoing maintenance is meaningful | Get to a state that represents who you are now | | Typical investment | Scoped per engagement (smaller, defined) | Scoped per engagement (larger, project-shaped) | | What gets touched | Code, security, performance baseline | Design, content, performance, sometimes stack | | What you ship | A "State of the Site" report and a stable site | A relaunched site with documented strategy |
Resurrection lives inside WordPress Maintenance. Renaissance is its own engagement.
What's Included
Phase 1 — Discovery (Week 1)
We don't propose a redesign before we understand the site. The first week is:
- Analytics review — what pages actually drive your business, what people search to find you, what they do when they land
- Content inventory — every page, post, and asset, categorized as keep / merge / rewrite / retire
- Technical audit — Core Web Vitals, mobile usability, accessibility baseline, SEO health, schema coverage
- Brand check-in — what's still true, what's changed, what's aspirational vs. real
- Competitive look — three competitors, what they're doing well, what they're doing poorly
Output: a one-page direction document. You approve it before we touch anything.
Phase 2 — Design and Build (Weeks 2–5)
- Design system — colors, type, spacing, components. Modern but compatible with your existing brand. We don't reinvent your identity.
- Page templates — homepage, service pages, about, contact, blog, plus any custom templates your business needs
- Content migration — keep / merge / rewrite / retire decisions executed, with editorial review
- Stack decision — sometimes the answer is "stay on WordPress, modernize the theme." Sometimes the answer is "move to Next.js with MDX content." We'll have that conversation in Phase 1, with honest tradeoffs.
- Performance pass — Core Web Vitals in the green before launch, not after
Phase 3 — Launch (Week 6)
- Redirect mapping — every old URL with measurable traffic gets a 301 to the right new URL. SEO equity preserved.
- Schema rebuild — clean structured data, validated against schema.org
- Search Console handoff — new sitemap submitted, Indexing API pings for the highest-value URLs
- Analytics continuity — GA4 properties carry over, conversion events validated
- Soft-launch period — 14 days of monitoring with daily checks on rankings, traffic, and errors
Phase 4 — Documented Handoff
You get a written runbook in plain English, version-controlled (we use markdown in a Git repo). It covers how the site is built, what to touch and what not to touch, how to add content, how to update copy, who to call if something breaks. If you ever change vendors, this is what they'll need.
What This Costs
Renaissance is scoped per engagement — every site has different content density, integration complexity, and editorial needs, and pricing a project before we've done the discovery week is dishonest theater.
| Scope shape | Timeline | |-------------|----------| | Standard Renaissance — WordPress modernization, 15–25 pages | ~6 weeks | | Renaissance Plus — Next.js migration, 15–25 pages, MDX content pipeline | ~8 weeks | | Renaissance Pro — Multi-property or commerce, custom integrations | 10+ weeks, quoted |
We'll scope the actual number in a 30-minute conversation. If we're not the right fit, we'll say so. If we are, you'll get a fixed quote before any work starts — no hourly drift, no "discovery phase that becomes the project."
When Renaissance Is the Wrong Call
- Your site is broken. Start with Resurrection. You can't redesign on top of a foundation that's still on fire.
- You don't have content to write or edit. Renaissance includes editorial work, but it doesn't include thinking up your strategy from scratch. If you don't know what you sell or who you sell to, fix that first.
- You want a 10-page brochure site for $1,500. Use Squarespace. It's a perfectly fine tool for that scope.
- You're three weeks from a launch event. Renaissance is six weeks minimum. Don't ship a half-baked rebuild against a hard deadline.
What You Get at the End
A site that represents you now. Documented strategy. Preserved SEO. A handoff runbook. A 30-day post-launch check-in included in price. Optional ongoing maintenance through our Maintenance Plans if you want continuity.
How to Start
Send us your URL and three sentences about why now. We'll do a 20-minute call, look at the site together, and tell you honestly whether Renaissance is the right service or whether you need Resurrection, a fresh build, or just a content refresh.
Hank Groman | hank@lastapple.com | 949-529-9017