Cultivate Pro Proposal

Thank you for taking the time to talk with us about your website. This proposal should give you an overview of our process, timeline, budget, and scope of work for Cultivate Pro.

Cultivate Pro is a rapid-delivery process for designing and building a custom theme. We’ve pre-built the common features and functionality—based on SEO guidance and our extensive experience—that most bloggers need. We work with you to select the styles and key components to make it your own, then build a custom theme based on your selections.

Cultivate Pro includes over 160 unique elements to choose from, 6 key pages, and up to 3 hours of design modifications. If you’d like additional custom blocks, more key pages, or other modifications to address any specific out-of-scope needs you may have, we can easily add them through CultivateWP Support at the conclusion of initial development at our standard hourly rate.

If our proposal is agreeable, please complete the form at the bottom of this page. After submission, you’ll be able to select your desired start date for your Cultivate Pro project.

— Bill & Duane

What’s Included

We keep the scope of a Cultivate Pro project tight to ensure a quick turnaround at the lowest possible cost to serve the needs of most bloggers. The scope-of-work is:

  • 3hr guided design call to select key components of your website, including your choice of:
    • 1-of-18 site headers
    • 1-of-9 site footers
    • 1-of-7 breadcrumbs
    • 1-of-16 post headers
    • 1-of-7 category headers
    • 1-of-8 WPRM headers & matching roundup blocks
    • 1-of-6 WPRM footers
    • 1-of-5 post summary image aspect ratio options
    • 1-of-8 post summary content display options
    • 1-of-6 quicklinks label options
    • 1-of-7 recipe index patterns
    • 1-of-3 about page patterns
    • Your choice of up to 16 custom blocks (as seen in, find recipes, about, author box, cookbook, cookbook banner, email, ebook, save recipe email, social promo, table of contents, FAQs, recipe tips, social share, post meta, content-image) in a variety of styles—more than 75 blocks to choose from
  • Design of Style Guide, defining the theme’s colors, typography, and Accessibility color contrast testing
  • Custom logo placement in selected site header and site footer, including adjusting spacing around the logo
  • Custom brand colors, usage determined by the designer
  • Custom heading font, usage determined by the designer
  • 6 key pages designed based on your Style Guide and selected key components: Home, Single Post, Standard Category Page, Cultivate Category Page, Recipe Index, About
  • Up to 3 hours of design modifications
  • Development of a custom WordPress theme based on the approved designs. The theme will be built and tested on your host’s staging environment
  • Inclusion of our private plugins Cultivate Category Pages and Cultivate Video Pages.
  • White Glove Site Launch to deploy the new theme to your site
  • Plugin Audit to reduce unnecessary plugins and optimize remaining plugins.

What’s Not Included

Cultivate Pro is designed to rapidly deliver a custom branded theme at the lowest possible cost. In order to stay on track with the rapid delivery timeline, we must limit the scope of modifications. While we will do everything in the What’s Included section describing the scope-of-work, we are unable to perform the following out-of-scope changes during the design and development phases of your new Cultivate Pro theme:

  • Branding — Cultivate Pro is a theme design service, so branding (logo and colors) are outside the scope of the project. We have a variety of branding options available, or you can work with an outside company for branding, or we can retain your existing logo and colors.
  • SEO — Cultivate Pro is based on sound SEO expert advice, but we are designers and developers, not SEO experts. For SEO guidance relating to your particular site, we highly recommend speaking with an SEO expert. 99% of our clients see no negative SEO impact from a redesign, but we of course cannot guarantee any particular SEO outcome.
  • Content Modifications — As the subject matter expert, you are responsible for the content of your site. If you require assistance with writing content or content strategy, please consult your content strategist. We do not recommend making large content changes to your site during the redesign process. Content restructuring should occur either before or after the redesign process.
  • Element modifications — The key elements and blocks in Cultivate Pro are pre-defined. That means you choose an existing element, we apply your brand colors and fonts, and then build a custom theme based on your selections and styles. If you would like to redesign an element, we can do so through CultivateWP Support at our standard hourly rate.
  • Custom blocks — Cultivate Pro includes our Post Listing block with 16 unique layouts, our Quick Links block with 4 unique layouts, and your choice of up to 16 custom blocks available in a variety of styles. If you would like additional custom Post Listing layouts, additional Quick Links layouts, or a custom block, we can do so through CultivateWP Support at our standard hourly rate.
  • Additional Key Pages — Cultivate Pro includes 6 key pages: Home, Single Post, Standard Category Page, Cultivate Category Page, Recipe Index, About. If you would like additional key page designs—for example a Cookbook page, or an affiliate links shop page, or an Instagram link-in-bio page, or a unique single post style for posts in a specific category—we can do so through CultivateWP Support at our standard hourly rate.
  • Additional Cultivate Category Pages — Cultivate Pro includes the design and setup of one (1) example Cultivate Category Page. You may set up additional categories to use the Culivate Category Pages functionality to curate content on those categories. You can do so after initial development and prior to site launch, or after site launch.
  • Technical debt — Cultivate Pro includes solving normal technical issues related to changing a theme, but custom development time required to solve unique technical problems introduced by your previous theme are outside the scope of the project. If you have such issues we will let you know, and if you wish we can solve the problems at our standard hourly rate.
  • Significant design modifications — Cultivate Pro includes up to 3 hours of design modifications. That’s plenty of time to cover the minor tweaks and alterations for most projects, but it’s not enough for major wholesale modifications. Depending on the scope and size of the modifications, we will recommend one of the following approaches:
    • Designing additional pages and/or blocks that don’t impact the core design of Cultivate Pro can be completed through CultivateWP Support at our hourly rate during or after the development phase.
    • Extensive updates to the Cultivate Pro design can be implemented by upgrading to Cultivate Pro Max which includes an additional 2 days of design and 2 days of development for an additional $8,000.
    • For even more extensive design updates, we can upgrade to Cultivate VIP which allows us to redesign every element and block inside Cultivate Pro. This extends the project timeline to 12-16 weeks and increases the project’s cost by $29,000.

How Long it Takes

As a rapid-delivery process, we’ll create your Cultivate Pro theme in just 1 month. We begin with a 3hr guided design call with you the week before starting, then we follow this schedule:

Week 1: Design We start designing mockups on Monday; you’ll receive your custom theme design by end-of-day Friday.

Week 2: Design Review your design and work with us to make minor design modifications (up to 3 hours of design modifications are included in-scope). Once modifications are complete, you will providde approval by the end of the week.

Week 3: Development Our development team is hard at work on your new custom theme.

Week 4: Development You’ll receive your custom theme for review and testing on your staging environment by end-of-day Friday.

Site Launch Once you’ve tested and approved the new theme—most clients only need a few days for testing—you’ll pick a launch date where we’ll make a fresh copy of your live site to your host’s staging environment, configure the new theme, and set up the key pages again. You’ll have one final review of the site with your up-to-date content, and then we’ll push it live.

Budget

Fees to create your website with Cultivate Pro will be $16,000, based on the scope of work, deliverables, and timeline outlined in this proposal. Changes in scope will be addressed separately at our standard rate of $250/hr. Fees are divided into two payments:

  • $8,000 deposit, non-refundable
  • $8,000 balance + any additional hourly additions due by the scheduled launch date.

All invoices must be paid in full prior to site launch.

Out of scope work will be completed through CultivateWP Support and invoiced at the end of each month.

Hosting Requirements

Please ensure your host provides a staging environment where we can build and test the new theme. Most high quality hosts include a staging environment.

When it is time to launch the site, we prefer one-click deployments from staging to production (more information). If your host does not offer this, your host can manually copy the staging site live at launch.

Our recommended hosts are BigScoots, WPEngine, Rocket.net and WPOpt. We find that our clients are most successful when using one of these hosts, and if you plan to move, we recommend migrating prior to development starting.

BigScoots will give you 3 months for $1 on any size plan. Simply go to their live chat and say “I’m a CultivateWP client and would like to migrate my site to BigScoots.”