Frequently asked questions

A logo and brand kit typically takes 3 to 4 weeks. A brand identity plus website typically takes 6 to 10 weeks. Product and platform design runs longer and is scoped in phases. The single biggest factor in the timeline is how quickly you can get content, photos and feedback back, not the design work itself.

Yes. Paige Simon Design is based in St. Louis, Missouri and works with small businesses across the St. Louis metro, including St. Charles, Kirkwood, Webster Groves, Clayton and Chesterfield, as well as clients anywhere in the United States working remotely. Local clients can meet in person; remote clients work over video calls and shared documents.

A logo is a mark. A brand is the whole system that mark lives inside: colours, typefaces, photography, tone of voice and the rules for how they are used. A logo on its own cannot keep your website, Instagram and printed materials looking like the same business. That consistency is what customers read as trustworthy.

A template is genuinely fine when your business is simple, your competitors are weak and you need to be online next week. A custom design is worth it when you need to explain something complicated, when trust is the deciding factor in the sale or when you are competing against businesses with much bigger budgets. Most small businesses are better served by a well-chosen template plus strong content strategy than by an expensive custom build they cannot maintain.

Service design is designing the experience of being your customer, not just the things they look at. It covers how someone enquires, how fast you reply, what your quote looks like, how onboarding feels and what happens after delivery. Small businesses usually lose customers here rather than at the website, a beautiful brand followed by a confusing intake form undoes its own work.

That is the heart of service design and it is usually where the biggest wins are hiding. Customers judge you on the visible moments: how fast you reply, what your quote looks like, how onboarding feels, whether anyone follows up. Every one of those moments is produced by something they never see, your intake form, your scheduling, who picks up which job, what actually gets written down. We map the whole path from first enquiry through to follow up, mark the points where work is duplicated or dropped, then redesign the steps behind the moments that matter. That does three things at once. The customer gets the same experience every time instead of a different one depending on how busy you were. Your team stops rebuilding the same decisions by hand. And the business can take on more work without the quality slipping, because scalability for a small business is rarely a software problem. It is almost always the absence of a written process that someone new could follow.

They are the same system seen from three angles. Your brand sets the expectation. It tells someone what kind of business to expect before they have dealt with you at all. Your website and platforms are where that expectation gets tested: the enquiry form, the booking flow, the client portal, the invoice. Your internal tools decide whether you can hold the standard on a week when you are slammed. When those three are designed separately you get the familiar gap. A polished brand, a website that asks for information you already have and a process that depends on one person remembering. When they are designed together the brand sets the standard, the platform holds people to it and the process makes it repeatable. That is what lets a small business feel the same to every customer and stay efficient while it grows.

Yes, where it genuinely earns its place. The useful question is not which AI tool to buy but which part of your process is slow, repetitive or inconsistent, and whether AI is the right fix for that specific thing. We design AI into products and workflows rather than bolting it on. On Design Book, a home planning app, the AI builds its prompt from the selections a homeowner has already saved, so it works from real decisions instead of a generic request. For a small business it usually looks more ordinary than the hype suggests: turning enquiries into a consistent intake, drafting replies from answers you have already written or producing first drafts in your own brand voice. Where AI would only add a moving part without saving you time, we will tell you that instead of selling it to you.

Often, yes. If the underlying platform is sound and the content is mostly right, a redesign of the visual layer plus a content strategy pass costs far less than a rebuild. A rebuild makes sense when the site is slow, not mobile-friendly, impossible for you to edit or built on a platform that is no longer supported.

Not to us. The one ongoing cost on a website is hosting, and that is not our gig. You pay the host directly, you own the account and you can move it or cancel it without going through us. Your domain renews the same way. We would rather you hold those logins than be tied to a designer for something you can manage yourself, so nothing about your site depends on keeping us on a retainer.

It starts with a brand form. It asks about your customers, your competitors, what is working and what is not, and it does most of the thinking before we ever get on a call. Then we have a kick off call to walk through your answers, agree what we are actually solving and set the timeline. From there we hold regular touchbases until the project goes live, so you are seeing the work as it develops rather than waiting weeks for a reveal. You will always know what is happening next and what we need from you to keep it moving.

Yes. Every site is built for the phone first and tested at phone, tablet and desktop widths before it launches. Most small business traffic now arrives on a phone, and it is often the highest intent traffic you get: someone checking your hours, your menu or your address while they are already out. A mobile site is not a shrunken desktop site. The navigation, the tap targets, the image sizes and the order of the content are all decided for a thumb on a small screen.

Yes. Client portals, booking and scheduling, member areas, order status and account dashboards are all things we design and build. This is usually where the back of house meets the front of house: the portal is only as good as the process behind it, so we map how the work actually moves through your business first and then design the screens your customer sees. Done well it removes the phone calls and emails you are currently answering by hand.

We design apps end to end and build the web-based ones. For a lot of small businesses a web app is the better answer anyway: it works on every phone, it needs no app store approval and customers do not have to download anything to use it once. When a project genuinely needs a native iOS or Android build, we design it and work alongside a developer to get it shipped. The first question is always whether an app is the right tool or whether a better website and a cleaner process would solve the same problem for less.

Every project ends with a training session and documentation so you can run the site yourself, plus two weeks of email support after launch. Ongoing maintenance packages are available for businesses that would rather not touch it, but the goal is that your consistency does not depend on us being available.

Open your website, your Instagram profile, your last invoice and a printed piece side by side. If the logo is a different colour, the typefaces do not match or the tone of voice changes between them, customers are noticing that before they can name it. Inconsistency does not read as variety. It reads as a business that might not be around next year.