Web design built for San Rafael, not templated.
San Rafael is the largest city in Marin County and the commercial heart of central Marin. The economy mixes professional services, healthcare (Kaiser, Marin General, MarinHealth), retail along Fourth Street, and the growing tech crowd that lives north and commutes south. San Rafael searches reflect that mix, your website has to speak to professional-service buyers, retail walk-ins, and healthcare patients all at once. Google's local pack drives the majority of in-town discovery, and most San Rafael businesses are losing it to slow Squarespace or WordPress competitors.
Who I build for in San Rafael
I take on one or two builds a month, so each one gets proper attention. The kind of San Rafael business I build for:
- professional services along Fourth Street and Lincoln Avenue, medical and dental practices near Kaiser and MarinHealth, restaurants and retail downtown, real estate agents serving central Marin, and home services contractors covering the broader county
Why local matters for your San Rafael website
Every North Bay town has distinct search behavior. In San Rafael, people searching for services use specific local signals, the neighborhood name, the landmark, the business type plus the city. A generic template site misses all of that. A site built with your specific San Rafael customer in mind, with San Rafael-specific schema, locally-named service pages, and content that mentions real San Rafael locations, ranks for the searches that actually convert.
I am based in Santa Rosa, 30-40 minutes from San Rafael depending on traffic. Most of the work happens in writing, so nothing needs scheduling. If you do call, you get me, not a support queue.
Recent North Bay work
I just launched Easy Breezy Car Wash, a 14-page marketing site, a full staff kiosk system with offline queueing, and a real-time owner dashboard, all custom-built for a Santa Rosa small business with locations across Sonoma County. It is a good example of what I can do when a client outgrows template solutions.
What it costs
A ten-page Practice site is $1,800. Larger marketing sites, redesigns, e-commerce, and custom web apps with booking, kiosks, or member portals scale up based on scope. Every quote is fixed-price, no hourly surprises. See all web design pricing →
Beyond websites
I help San Rafael businesses go further than just having a website:
- SEO + GEO + AEO, classical SEO plus Generative Engine Optimization and Answer Engine Optimization, so your business gets cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews when customers ask AI tools for recommendations.
- Capture forms + lead routing, custom forms matched to your sales process, with leads routed automatically to email, SMS, or a dashboard.
- Database management, member lists, customer databases, reservation systems, migrated from spreadsheets into tools your team will actually use.
- Email + SMS marketing campaigns, launched and managed on your own infrastructure, with proper warm-up, segmentation, and compliance.
San Rafael web design FAQs
How much does a custom website cost in San Rafael?
A ten-page Practice site is $1,800. A Practice site of up to ten pages is $1,800 and Growth at up to twenty pages is $3,500. E-commerce and custom web applications scale up based on scope. Every quote is fixed-price.
Do you only work with San Rafael businesses?
No. I am based in Santa Rosa and serve all of Marin County, plus the rest of the North Bay (Sonoma, Marin, Napa, Solano). I work in person with San Rafael clients when it helps and remotely otherwise.
How long does it take to build a website?
A typical small business marketing site launches in 4-6 weeks: written brief, design preview, build and revisions, then launch with DNS cutover. Larger custom builds with kiosks, dashboards, or member portals take 8-12 weeks.
Why hand-coded instead of WordPress, Wix, or Squarespace?
Custom-built sites load faster, score higher on Google's Core Web Vitals, rank better in local search, and never have a plugin break a critical feature. You own the code, the domain, and the hosting credentials.
Do you handle SEO and updates after launch?
Yes. Every site ships with full on-page SEO, schema.org structured data, an llms.txt manifest for AI search engines, and Google Business Profile setup. Monthly care plans ($79 to $299/mo) cover hosting, security, content changes, and SEO, GEO and AEO monitoring.
Will my San Rafael business show up in Google's local pack?
Local pack ranking comes from three signals: a fully-optimized Google Business Profile, on-page local SEO with San Rafael-specific schema and content, and local citations. I handle all three. How long that takes depends on how competitive your category is locally and how many reviews you already have, so I will not put a date on it.
Next step
Free written audit, sent by email. I will ask about your business, your San Rafael customer base, what you have tried, and what success looks like to you. If I am a good fit, I will send a fixed-price quote within 48 hours.