A domain that is yours
Registered in your name, in an account you control, with the login in your hands from day one. Not mine, not an agency's. This is the part people most often get wrong and it is the hardest to undo.
CASE STUDY
Example buildNew BusinessFirst Website for a Social-First Business
You built an audience on Instagram and TikTok. This is the address, the inbox and the page that are actually yours.
- Type
- Static site + your own email
- Build time
- About 2 weeks
- Platforms
- Browser, mobile-first
- Starts at
- ₹20,000*
This is an example build. Humans Of Coding is a new studio with no client work to show yet. This page describes how the project would be scoped and built — the same thinking you would get on a real one. Nothing here is a past client, and no number on this page is a result.
THE SITUATION
What's actually broken.
A new business is doing well on social. The reels land, the DMs come in, orders get taken in chat. It works, and for the first year or so there is no obvious reason to do anything else.
The problem is not that social media is bad at this. It is that everything you have built is held by companies that owe you nothing. Reach is adjusted without warning. Accounts get locked by an automated system with no one to appeal to. A platform can change its terms, its algorithm or its mind, and the audience you spent two years earning is not portable — you cannot export a follower list and take it somewhere else.
There is a second, quieter cost. A handle and a Gmail address read as a hobby. The moment you approach a supplier, quote for a corporate order, apply to a marketplace or open a payment gateway, someone asks for a website and a business email, and “DM us on Instagram” stops being an answer. That question arrives at exactly the point the business is trying to grow.
The fix is small, cheap and permanent: an address you own, an inbox at that address, and one page that says what you do. Social keeps doing what it is good at — reach — and stops being the only thing holding the business up.
Everything you have built sits inside someone else's app
One locked account and the whole shopfront disappears
Customers can follow a handle but cannot be sent an address
Orders and enquiries are buried in the same inbox as spam
VERSION ONE
What we'd build first.
Every item here earns its place by being something a real user would miss on day one.
One page that loads instantly
What you make, who it is for, what it costs, and how to reach you. Static HTML — no page builder, no database, nothing to be slow. It opens before a visitor on mobile data has decided to leave.
Email at your own domain
hello@yourbusiness.com rather than a Gmail address with numbers in it, set up so your messages actually arrive rather than landing in spam. This is the change customers notice first.
Your links, on your own address
Everything a link-in-bio service does — Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, catalogue, menu, order form — on a page you own, so the URL in your bio never has to change again.
Enquiries that reach a person
A short form, a WhatsApp button and a phone number, with messages arriving in the business inbox instead of being lost among DMs.
DELIBERATELY NOT IN V1
What we'd leave out.
Not because these are bad ideas. Because each one is designed better once the first version has told you something.
- An online store. If you are taking orders over chat and it is working, a checkout is a later project — build it when the volume makes chat painful, not before.
- A blog or a news section. An empty page dated eighteen months ago does more harm than no page at all.
- A content management system. For one page, editing the page directly is faster than learning an admin panel you will open twice a year.
- A logo and full brand identity. Worth paying a designer for separately — I will build around whatever you have.
UNDER THE HOOD
How it's put together.
- The site
- Plain HTML and CSS. Nothing to update, nothing to be hacked, and it will still work in five years without being touched
- Hosting
- A CDN on a free tier. At this size the hosting genuinely costs nothing, and it is fast everywhere without you configuring anything
- Domain
- Registered in your name at a mainstream registrar, renewed yearly
- A proper mailbox at your domain, with SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured so mail from you is trusted rather than filtered
- Enquiry form
- A form endpoint that emails you — a static site needs no database for this
HOW IT RUNS
Week by week.
-
01
Days 1–3
What the page says, and to whom. Domain chosen and registered in your name. Email set up and tested.
-
02
Days 4–9
Build, content, photos sized properly, and the links page.
-
03
Days 10–14
Live, bio links switched over, and a walk-through so you can edit it and read your own email.
THE HARD PART
Owning the address without owning a server
Every build has one problem that decides whether the rest of it matters. This is that problem, written out.
The build here is a couple of days of work. What actually takes the care is making sure that in three years, with or without me, the business still controls its own name.
That comes down to two things being in your name and not somebody else's: the registrar account where the domain lives, and the DNS records that point that domain at the site and the mail. I have seen businesses locked out of their own address because a developer registered it on their own account and then became unreachable — and the recovery process for that is slow, sometimes impossible, and always at the worst moment. So you create the registrar account, you hold the login, and I am given access rather than ownership.
The other half is email deliverability, which is where most cheap setups quietly fail. Sending from your own domain without SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured correctly means a meaningful share of your mail goes to spam — and you will not know, because nobody replies to tell you they never got it. Those three records take an hour to set up properly and are the difference between an email address that looks professional and one that works.
BEFORE A PRICE EXISTS
What we'd ask you first.
A quote given without these answers is a guess. These are the questions that actually move the number.
- 01What do you actually sell, and who buys it most often?
- 02Which platform brings you the most enquiries today?
- 03Has anyone ever asked you for a website or a business email, and in what context?
- 04Do you already own a domain, and is the account in your name?
- 05Who will read the business inbox, and how often?
AFTERWARDS
How we'd know it worked.
Agreed before the build starts, so there is something to judge it against other than whether it looks nice.
- The domain and the email account are in your name, and you have logged into both yourself.
- A test email from your address reaches a Gmail inbox rather than its spam folder.
- Your bio link points at your own domain, and never needs changing again.
- At least one enquiry arrives through the site rather than through a DM.
BEFORE YOU START
Worth knowing.
The site hosting is free at this size, but the domain and the mailbox are small recurring costs paid by you, to those providers — reckon on a few hundred rupees a month between them. That is the whole running cost of no longer renting your shopfront. This site is one of these, which is the most honest recommendation I can give it.
MVPs start at ₹20,000*. Final pricing depends on features and project scope. Third-party costs — cloud hosting, domains, external libraries, APIs, app-store fees and any other paid service — are billed separately and are not included.
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Read the case studyWant this built for your business?
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