Websites You Own
Hand-built sites, usually live within a week, at a fraction of agency cost. Hosted on Cloudflare for close to nothing, and the files are yours to keep or move. Redesigns, migrations, on-page SEO.
Cloudflare Pages · Squarespace migration · One-pagers · SEO
Sophie's Bureau builds websites that small businesses own outright: hand-built static sites on Cloudflare Pages, usually live within a week and at a fraction of an agency's cost. Hosting costs close to nothing, and no platform charges rent on your own pages. Redesigns, migrations off Squarespace, and on-page SEO.
For about fifteen years, owning a website has meant renting one. The subscription was a fair trade when the alternative was hard. It no longer is. A site built as plain files, hosted on Cloudflare, costs a few euros a year to run, loads faster than any platform page, and belongs to you in the way a document on your own disk belongs to you. I wrote out the argument in what owning a website used to mean, and what it could mean again, and then rebuilt my own site this way, and my father's.
Live within a week
Most agencies take weeks to turn a site around. Here one person designs and builds it, with no template to fight and no handover between teams, so sites usually go live within a week of the copy and images arriving. Waiting on that material slows a small site down far more than the build does. The price follows the same logic: there is no team to pay for, so a build costs a fraction of an agency quote, and once the site is live the hosting bill rounds to nothing.
New sites
Each site is designed and written for the business, built as static HTML and CSS with as little JavaScript as the job allows, and deployed on Cloudflare Pages. It comes with the structured data that search engines and AI assistants read, a sitemap, proper page titles and descriptions, and no cookies or tracking unless you ask for them. A one-page website built in an afternoon, hosted for free shows the smallest version of this; the portfolio shows the rest.
Migrations off Squarespace, Wix and WordPress
Moving a site is mostly a question of not losing anything: every old address redirected to its new one, page titles and descriptions preserved, images re-optimised, the sitemap resubmitted. I plan the redirect map before touching the design and I check search results after launch. I moved my father's site off Squarespace and gave each of his works its own page so the art could be found; the same approach works for a consultancy with eight years of articles.
Redesigns and on-page SEO
For a site that is staying where it is, on Squarespace or elsewhere, I do redesigns, layout and UX tidy-ups, forms, payments and the on-page SEO basics: titles, descriptions, headings, internal links, structured data, and the page speed fixes that platforms make hard.
Who this is for
Consultants, coaches, artists and small practices who want a site they will not have to think about, that costs almost nothing to keep, and that will still be theirs in ten years.
How it is priced
Builds start from €1,600 ex-VAT for a one-page or small site and are quoted on scope. Light maintenance fits inside any monthly retainer.
Questions people ask before this kind of work
- What does 'a website you own' mean in practice?
A set of static files on hosting you control, on a domain you hold, with no platform subscription in between. The hosting on Cloudflare Pages costs close to nothing. If you stop working with me, the site keeps running exactly as it is, and any competent developer can pick it up.
- How quickly can a site go live?
Usually within a week of the copy and images arriving. A one-page site can be quicker. A migration with years of articles and a long redirect map takes longer, and I say so when I quote.
- Can you move my site off Squarespace without losing search rankings?
Yes. Every old URL is mapped to its new address with a permanent redirect, the page titles and descriptions carry over, and the sitemap is resubmitted. Done properly, a migration is invisible to search engines.
- Can I edit the site myself afterwards?
For text changes, yes: the content is plain HTML and I document where everything lives. For structural changes I can either do them as small projects or set up a simple content file you edit. Most clients find they need far fewer changes than they expected.
- How much does a website cost?
Builds start from €1,600 ex-VAT for a one-page or small site and rise with page count, content migration and custom features. Squarespace builds and refreshes are still available for clients who want to stay on the platform, priced the same way.