Supercharge Your Website
Your website should do more than sit there looking nice. Two add-ons that answer questions, capture leads, and pick up the phone, day or night, even when you can't.
Your data stays in-house. Always.
The Website Assistant
Chat Desk: the helper that never clocks out
A friendly chat bubble sits in the corner of your site and answers your customers the second they ask: your hours, your services, your prices, whatever they need. When someone's ready to do business, it grabs their name and number and sends it straight to you.
Answers from your own business
It learns your services, hours, and policies, so the answers are right, not generic guesses.
Sends leads straight to you
A visitor leaves a name and number, it lands in your inbox while they're still warm.
Books the appointment
Ready customers get pointed straight to your calendar. No phone tag.
Talk or type, English or Spanish
Customers can tap to speak their question. It answers back in the language they used.
Never sleeps, answers in seconds, and works on the tiniest phone screen.
Chat Desk pricing
Free basic version with any website we build
Totally optional, and yours free if you want it. Just $24/mo on its own for a site we don't host; setup's waived when bundled.
The big enterprise chat platforms won't even show you a price. You "contact sales," wait weeks to launch, and your customers' data lives on their servers. Ours is one flat price, live in days, and the data stays yours.
The Virtual Receptionist
Voice Desk: the receptionist that answers every call
When you're on a job, driving, or closed for the night, Voice Desk picks up. It talks to the caller like a friendly front-desk person, answers the common questions, books the job, and texts you the details before the caller even hangs up.
Picks up when you can't
No more missed calls going to a competitor. Every ring gets answered.
Books on the call
Confirms a time and puts it on your calendar before the caller's done talking.
Catches after-hours overflow
Evenings, weekends, lunch rush. The calls you'd otherwise lose.
Texts you every lead
Name, number, and what they needed, in your pocket in real time.
Starter
$97/mo
After-hours overflow. 100 call-minutes. Texts you every lead.
Standard · most popular
$197/mo
Adds same-day booking, Spanish, and emergency bridging. 250 minutes.
Pro
$247/mo
Primary line. Calendar and CRM. Backup-tech rotation. 500 minutes.
One-time $497 setup, waived when bundled with a website plan. The big voice-receptionist services start around $300 a month to do less. Voice Desk starts at $97, and even Pro comes in under their entry price.
★ The Part Nobody Else Tells You
Your data stays yours
Every question a customer asks and every number they leave stays in your hands. It's not parked on some outside company's servers where it can be mined, studied, or used to chase your own customers.
Most of the big chat and "virtual receptionist" services quietly keep all of it. Your customer list, your busiest hours, who's shopping for what. It becomes their data on their platform. Ours doesn't work that way. The conversations and the leads live with you, in-house, period. If you ever walk away, you take everything with you because it was always yours.
- In your inboxLeads come to you, not a third party's dashboard.
- No client poachingNobody else gets a window into who your customers are.
- Yours to keepNo platform lock-in holding your data hostage.
Where your data actually goes
The usual setup
With us
Straight Talk
Why a software engineer is doing this in Magnolia
There's a part most shops won't say out loud.
Before The Shipping Place, I wrote software at Amazon. So when I came home and watched local owners get sold websites and "marketing," something didn't sit right.
The people selling it usually aren't engineers. They're salespeople. They take your money, hand the real work to a template or to programmers overseas, and what comes back is a slow, cookie-cutter site that Google quietly stopped rewarding years ago. It loads slow. It's an easier target to break into. And it doesn't rank. You pay a premium price for a discount product, and nobody ever tells you why your phone isn't ringing.
The new wave is the same move in a shinier wrapper. "AI receptionists" and "AI chatbots" sold by folks who can't actually tell you how any of it works, priced higher than it costs to build, while your customers' questions and phone numbers get quietly parked on someone else's servers. Your data becomes their product.
I got tired of watching good neighbors get fleeced. So I started building. Real, hand-coded sites. The same kind of smart assistant and virtual receptionist the big platforms sell, built better and kept in-house. That's why a big chunk of what I do now is websites, getting you found on Google, and these two add-ons. Not because it's trendy. Because this town deserved someone in its corner who actually builds the thing.
What they don't tell you
"A website is a website."
Speed, security, and structure decide whether Google and the AI assistants ever show you. Most template sites lose all three.
"Your marketer is a tech expert."
Most are salespeople reselling overseas work at a markup, and they're long gone when it breaks.
"All AI chat and phone tools are the same."
Most are resold platforms the seller didn't build and can't fully explain. The tech moves faster than they keep up with.
"It's just a chatbot, the data doesn't matter."
Your customers' questions and numbers are gold, and most services keep a copy on their own servers.
My promise to you
- 1.I will never harvest or sell your data, or your customers' data. Ever. It stays in-house, with you.
- 2.Everything is hand-built to run faster and safer than the bloated template sites the national agencies hand out. We hold a 90-plus performance bar, not a "good enough."
- 3.You deal with one local person, veteran-owned, right here in Magnolia. Not a support ticket and a time zone twelve hours away.
Why we win, plain and simple
The usual way
- ✗Your data on their servers
- ✗Routed through outside companies
- ✗Slow template site that won't rank
- ✗A salesperson, gone when it breaks
- ✗Pay a platform rent, forever
With me
- ✓Data in-house, in your inbox
- ✓Stays under one roof
- ✓Hand-built, fast, ranks, 90-plus score
- ✓One local engineer who answers
- ✓Free with your site, no rent
Want your website working this hard?
Tell me about your business and I'll set you up with the assistant, the receptionist, or both, on a site that's already fast and easy to find.
See full website pricing on the Websites page. Veteran-owned, right here in Magnolia.