The desk behind the board

TradePages exists because "what's the best website builder?" is the wrong question, and every trade asks a better one. The restaurateur asks what online ordering really costs per order. The worship pastor asks who takes the smallest cut of the plate. The agent asks what IDX will add to the bill. This site is a desk that answers the trade's version of the question — one guide per trade, one pick per guide.

Who runs the desk

The people behind TradePages have shipped real sites for real trades — booking pages for studios, ordering menus for kitchens, giving flows for congregations, merch stores for bands — and carried the invoices that followed. Nobody here is famous and nobody needs to be: the value of the desk is the file, not the byline. What we bring is the scar tissue of having chosen wrong before — the booking add-on that doubled a bill, the "free" plan that charged at checkout, the migration that lost a mailing list. The trades on this board aren't abstractions to us; they're former clients, day jobs and side businesses.

Why one guide per trade

Most review sites publish one enormous ranking and hope your case is average. We publish ten small ones. Each trade on the board gets its own researched fact base, its own price checks, and one verdict scored for that trade alone — Squarespace rates 7.9 for real estate agents and 8.0 for nonprofits here, and both numbers are correct, because the jobs are different. Depth is the whole bet: a guide that knows one trade can tell you which fee will actually hit you. And when a trade's facts change, that one guide gets reopened rather than the whole edifice quietly going stale.

The one-pick rule is deliberate discipline. A list of eleven "winners" is a way of never being wrong; naming a single top pick per trade means we can be wrong in public, and have to keep checking that we aren't.

What we won't do

We won't invent a client story to make a point — every scenario in these guides is hypothetical and labelled that way. We won't quote a price we couldn't verify as if we had; unverified figures are written "around", with the softness showing. And we won't skip a vendor because it has no affiliate program — the specialists appear with their real prices because the comparison is dishonest without them.

Independence, in one paragraph

Some vendors on this site may pay us a commission through /go/ links; the full roster is in the affiliate disclosure. The method that sets every pick is public at how we rank. The short version: money enters after the verdict, never before it. If you want to test that, start with the board of best website builders by industry and check our arithmetic — corrections land at the contact desk.