Common Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

We’ve compiled these FAQs — split into three distinct categories — for visitors to our website. They cover most of the key issues prospective clients ask us about. If you have any more questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Section I

General Questions

These questions cover foundational questions about our company and offerings.

XenonPrime is a web design agency based in Northern Virginia. Our founder, Ashrut Rode, has extensive experience developing web applications and wanted to extend his services into WordPress, Framer, Shopify, Ghost, and custom web development. You can read more about the company here.

A website is often the first impression that potential customers have of your business. Unlike time-consuming appointments and telephone calls, accessing a website is a quick and easy task that has been become a staple of modern life. We want to help you develop an impressive website that showcases your unique and exceptional offerings.

Truthfully, the bulk of our work is in web design, but we do offer services in other closely related digital marketing areas.  The six core services we provide are web design, SEO, social media, branding, web hosting, and copywriting.  To learn more about how we can help with each, click here to go to our Services page.

Great question!  We offer high quality services at reasonable prices, and our extensive track record speaks for itself.  To date, we’ve created 20+ websites for tradesmen, politicians, healthcare providers, academics, financial professionals, businessmen, online magazines, photographers, construction companies, and more.  This wide array of clients, coupled with our universal accolades, showcases our highly developed yet flexible skillset.

Absolutely! We belong to one of the largest networking groups in the DC-Maryland-Virginia area (BNI Capital Business Alliance), so feel free to ask us for an introduction to a specific profession. It’s quite likely that we’ll be able to connect you with someone who can help.

You can find the links to both here: Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

Section II

Technical Questions

In this section, you’ll find answers to questions about the platforms and technologies we use. We’ll also answer some foundational questions about digital marketing and web design in general.

WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS) that allows us to build beautiful websites much faster than the traditional coding-from-scratch model. Moreover, no other CMS comes anywhere close to WordPress in terms of market share: Indeed, a whopping 40% of websites on the Internet are WordPress websites. The ubiquity of WordPress and its high adoption rate mean that there is almost always a solution or specific plug-in to address your needs.

The domain name is your website name or prefix with a domain extension at the end.  For example, our domain name is “xenonprime.com”, which uses our business name “XenonPrime” as the prefix and the most commonly used domain extension “.com” as the suffix.

It is important to mention that domains with the same prefix but different domain extensions/suffixes are considered entirely different domain names and must be purchased separately.  For example, as of this writing, “harvard.edu”, “harvard.com”, and “harvard.org” are three distinct websites.  As such, purchasing one prefix and suffix combination does not automatically provide ownership to the same prefix but with different domain extensions.

Many companies elect to purchase domain names with the same prefix but different suffixes and reroute them to one main, canonical version.  We are more than happy to assist you with this and have actually done so ourselves, as “xenonprime.org” and “xenonprime.net” reroute to “xenonprime.com”.  The cost of one domain name is generally inexpensive at about $12/year.

You can think of web hosting as the rent you pay to hold space on a server in a warehouse. Web hosting is where all your website’s files, code, and images are stored. These files allow your website to be rendered and displayed when someone navigates to your domain name.

Custom-coded websites are the origin of web development. They are distinct from classic “brochure” websites and have features and functionalities that are so advanced that they need to be coded by a software engineer. Often, for custom-coded websites, the website itself is the product — for instance, websites likes instagram.com or x.com.

Interestingly enough, we’ve actually developed several full-stack web applications using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for the frontend and PHP, Python, or Java for the backend. However, these types of originally designed websites are only appropriate in the rare circumstances when a highly customizable solution is needed. Moreover, custom-coded websites take an immense amount of time to develop and are therefore significantly more expensive.

As a result, we encourage our clients to go with one of the aforementioned platforms. In fact, we frequently utilize a hybrid approach where the website is built on a CMS like WordPress but enhanced through custom code — for example, we are able to provide custom animations and applications like complex calculators using CSS and JavaScript for clients who are in need of such features.

Yes! We’ve worked on websites built in Framer, Ghost, and Shopify. Here is a breakdown of these platforms and why we sometimes choose them:

Framer is a high-end web design platform that is popular in the tech industry — think SaaS businesses and companies that have raised venture capital funding. We choose it when clients want a very inspiring and polished look but aren’t as concerned with other related digital marketing services like SEO or lead generation.
Ghost is a platform for blogs and online magazines. It allows for recurring subscriptions, gated content, and significant aesthetic modifications. It’s a good platform for businesses that want a website similar to major online magazines such as forbes.com, vox.com, or theatlantic.com.
Shopify is a foundational e-commerce builder. In fact, many multimillion-dollar businesses like those of the Kardashians and Rihanna use it to power their online stores. It’s also commonly preferred by e-commerce owners due to its versatility and ease of use.

Those are great options for beginners, but it’s worth mentioning that they don’t offer the same level of customization or have nearly as much market share as WordPress does.

Moreover, WordPress works a little differently in that you have to buy your own web hosting and then install WordPress onto your server. At the other companies, they handle web hosting for you, meaning you’re entirely boxed into their platform. This can lead to higher monthly web hosting costs over the long term.

Yes, we do use AI in our services that we provide to our clients.  We actually wrote an in-depth article on how we utilize AI here.  We encourage you to read it if you’re interested in a thorough article on the matter.

For brevity’s sake, the “tl;dr” version is that we use AI in two main ways: ChatGPT to generate copy and Midjourney to create images.  We do recognize that AI-written copy has its drawbacks, but the pragmatic issue is that writing professional, human-made copy takes an immense amount of time, and while we’re happy to do it, it will considerably increase the cost of our services.

Yes. We use a company called Jotform, which offers HIPAA-compliant forms when users submit confidential information. You can get a reduced rate if you use our affiliate link. Make you sure sign up for the “Gold” plan, as that’s the only one that is HIPAA compliant. Please reach out to us if you have any questions.

Section III

Pricing Questions

We recognize that price is a significant factor when making a decision about which agency to partner with. That’s why we’ve put together a detailed list of questions and answers to our fee structure and pricing policies.

The age-old question!  The truth—and we know it will cause some consternation—is that: “It depends”!  No surprise there.  However, the “tl;dr” answer is $100 – $10,000+. Let’s break down that large range.

Our lowest price offering is for ad-hoc edits.  These small revisions are when businesses or individuals come to us with an already existing website—it may or may not have been built by us—and just want to clean it up.  This type of work ranges from $100 – $500.  We colloquially call this our “don’t burn down the house” offering.

The second category is full website builds, and we’re currently offering these for $500/page, with a $5K minimum.  However, it’s important to note that websites with a large amount of customization may warrant higher prices.  It depends on the situation, but we promise that we’ll let you know what the price is before we begin any work.

The last category is our white-labeling arrangements.  These deals involve us partnering with a larger, more established marketing agency that has a steady clientele and wants web design help without having to pay for a full-time hire. We similarly would like at least $5,000 or 33% of the total cost of the project—whichever is higher.  This contract is quite generous for the client, as a $30,000 project can be done by us for only $10,000.  Indeed, in such a scenario, the client will pocket most of the money—namely, $20,000.

Of course!  We’re always happy to chat with potential clients, brainstorm different ideas, and create a roadmap for the future.  If you would like to have a free consultation, you can sign up here: calendly.com/xenonprime.

We use Stripe because of its ease of use and secure processing infrastructure. Here is the link to make a payment.

Yes!  We’ve found that most of our clients want a one-and-done model, but we occasionally do have clients who are interested in ongoing services.  We usually do them at our hourly rate of $100, but we can absolutely also create a set monthly price and potentially even give a discount to clients who bundle several hours.

We believe in full transparency and don’t have any hidden fees as part of our services.  With that being said, it’s important to note that there are outside costs that are separate but related.

The two that immediately come to mind are web hosting and the annual domain fee.  These two are relatively small, especially relative to our web design fees.  For example, at Hostinger—a popular and commonly used hosting provider—we can bring the web hosting fee down to about $3.50/month if you use our affiliate link.  The domain fee at Hostinger is around $15/year but can be packaged with the web hosting for the first year.

For clients who want a higher-end web hosting company, we recommend WordPress.com, owned by Automattic.  Their plans are slightly more expensive at $8-$50/month but are appropriate for more complex websites such as those with e-commerce capabilities.

Thanks for asking this question, because it’s an extremely important one.

The primary reason we charge more than $100 for full website builds is because of the quality and expertise that we bring. We have an extensive portfolio of website across many industries that demonstrate our exceptional abilities, including this website xenonprime.com.

Creating these types of websites takes considerable time and skill, and the market rate for such products is actually closer to $10,000-$15,000.

Lastly, we would not be able to run a business if we only charged $100 per website.