Good at what you do? Your website should say so
Most businesses we meet are good at their work and bad at explaining it. Not because they don’t know what they do, but because nobody ever helped them find the words. That’s the job we’re built for.
Plate IA period wrestling photograph
You know what you do. Your customers often don’t
You can explain your business across a counter in a minute flat. Online, it comes out different. The website says what everyone in your industry says, or it says a lot and lands nothing, or there isn’t one because writing it never made it to the top of the list.
The cost doesn’t show up as a bill. It shows up as the customer who looked, didn’t quite get it, and called someone else.
So we start with the words, not the design
Before anything is built, we sit down with you and ask the questions your customers would ask. Who buys from you, why they pick you, what they get wrong about you, and how they describe what you do in their own words.
From that we write your pages. Then we build the website around them, keep it running, and send you a plain-English report every week showing who came, what they read, and who got in touch.
Finding the sentence, in the words your customers would use rather than the ones your industry prefers, is most of what you’re paying for. It’s also the part that usually gets skipped.
first
And here’s how it goes
No pitch
We ask what your business does and who buys from you. If we’re not the right fit, you’ll hear it then, not after you’ve paid.
We find the words
A longer conversation about your business, your customers and your work, for a fixed fee of $395. We write your pages from it and send them to you to correct. If you go ahead with the website, the fee comes off the build price.
We build it
On a private copy nobody else can see. You look it over, we fix what’s wrong, then it goes live. Four to six weeks from start to launch is normal.
We keep it running
Updates, backups, security and small changes, every month. And a report every week, so you can see whether it’s working.
You’ll know what it costs before you call.
The prices are on the package pages, in numbers.
Plate IIJansie Blom, who started Stoei
And you’ll always know who to ask
Every site gets one point of contact who knows it and answers when you ask. You won’t be handed around, and you won’t be a ticket number. You’ll get a reply by the next business day: not a 2 a.m. emergency line, but an honest promise that holds.
That point of contact is Jansie Blom (say it like Yahtzee, with an N instead of the T), who started Stoei.
Parts that fit
Trained as a toolmaker: a trade about precision, and about things that don’t fail when somebody’s relying on them.
Forty small businesses
Then years running an agency in South Africa, looking after around forty small businesses. It was bought by a larger company, and he stayed on as its chief marketing officer.
The person who answers
Bigger made the work more polished and the clients less looked after. What they missed was someone who knew their site and answered when they asked. Stoei is built around that.
Back to the tools
Now in Louisville, working with his hands again as a maintenance technician. It’s why the unglamorous part of a website, the backups, updates and monitoring, gets the most care.
It worked at the last one
From clients of Jansie’s previous agency, in South Africa.
“Great value, flexibility and after-hours availability make it impossible to use another service provider. We are return-clients and find the professional, personal and trust-worthy service a welcome change to the rigid franchises that are out there seemingly wanting to overcharge and under-deliver.”
Humkoop
Agricultural co-operative
“The detailed reports and the insights they bring on how a business should stay on message, is one of the many reasons why we trust our business with them. Jansie and his team has a sense of business ethics and values that we respect.”
Peter van Nieuwenhuizen
Skopus Business Consultants
“Firstly they host my email and website… Affordable, friendly and extremely hands on, nothing is an effort. In the big corporate world you are often just a number.”
Bernadette de Wet
Yellow Telephone
And the name?
Stoei is Afrikaans. It means to wrestle. You wrestle with a thousand things in a week. The website shouldn’t be one of them, so we do the wrestling for you.
Jacob wrestled God all night and wouldn’t let go until he was blessed. He walked away with a limp, and a new name.
Keep wrestling the things that deserve it: your trade, your people, the work only you can do.
Just not your website. Hand that one over.
Plate IIITwo figures wrestling, engraved
And if you’d like the whole wrestle
A name has a lot of jobs. It has to survive being said once over the phone. It has to look right on an invoice. It can’t promise anything that isn’t true. And nobody else can already be using it. That last one did most of the damage.
It started as FloForge Labs, the name on the software side. Said out loud, it kept coming back with a W in it. A name you have to spell for people is a name that leaks.
So the search went to the workshop, because that’s where all of this began. Red Seal Refinery. Fettle & File. Whitesmith. Good, solid words, and every one of them crowded or already taken by somebody’s agency. Web designers got to the forge and the anvil a long time ago.
Then Afrikaans. Wroeg looked right and sounded right, until it turned out to mean reproach. Not the word you want on an invoice.
And then stoei. To wrestle. Nobody was using it, it fit the work, and it fit the picture of Jacob at the river, holding on until morning.
The lines had their own fight. The first one came before the name:
Using our time to free up yours.
It was true, and it described the deal. But read cold, it could have belonged to a bookkeeper, a cleaner or a virtual assistant. It said what you’d get back, never what we’d take off you.
The name rewrote it:
Wrestling so you don’t have to.
That one stuck. You can see the thing being wrestled, and you can see whose side of the table it’s on. It doesn’t shout from the top of the page, though. That spot goes to what you actually came for:
You know what you do. We make sure your customers do too.
That’s the whole job, really. Most businesses know exactly what they do. What they don’t have is the sentence. If it took this many rounds to find one for a business we know inside out, it’s no wonder yours keeps getting put off.
That’s the wrestle. Hand it over.