Introducing Feast+

Feast+ is a designer-curated set of styling options that help you define your brand, and attract high paying brand sponsorships.

The Feast Plugin setup comes with best practices baked right in, for compliance with SEO, accessibility, mobile optimization and user experience. Complying with all these requirements creates a very standard setup that just works and saves you from having to learn CSS and programming just to fix basic issues (like the warnings that you get in Google Search Console).

We've seen people go with custom themes for years, because they wanted a little more styling options. This typically meant spending ~$1000 on small CSS tweaks, or $5,000 - $20,000 on full custom.

However, over the last year or two we've had customers who previously went custom, come back to the Feast Plugin setup in order to solve the dozens of issues that a custom site can create.

It's been a dream of ours to be able to offer a more custom setup that reflects an individual site owners values and aesthetics, while still remaining affordable and complying with best practices.

Problems with custom sites

Some of the issues we've seen with custom sites include:

• high price tags ($5,000 - $20,000+)
• waitlists
• long project cycles (6-12 months) which can result in a site launching that's already outdated
• $75 invoices for answering an email
• poorly developed custom solutions to long-solved problems

We've been experimenting for years for a way to offer design options that are inexpensive, don't require waiting, and leverage a solid technical base.

What's the value in a custom site?

Custom sites do have value, and the high prices are actually completely reasonable given the work that goes into them. A typical custom site involves a huge amount of back and forth with:

• developing a personal connection
• personality fit
• designers
• developers
• brand discovery
• mockups
• implementation
• revisions
• custom development

The majority of the cost is simply educating and communicating about what's possible or not possible, and why. There's no way to do this without charging similar fees, but we can offer more stylized options that check off the visual components without going fully custom.

What does a designer help with?

The reason that you need a designer is because creating a cohesive brand experience is very tricky to get right.

Tools that let you customize everything without guidelines or restrictions end up creating frankenstein-esque sites that run into problems with accessibility, SEO and user experience.

Accessibility

A knowledgeable designer is aware of the accessibility requirements and creative work arounds to comply with text sizing, background requirements, design patterns and more.

Accessibility isn't just font sizes and colors. It's font legibility. And contrast on multiple backgrounds. It's screen reader navigation. Hidden labels. Keyboard navigation. When to use content and when to use icons.

This all takes time to craft, especially factoring in an individual site owners requests and compromises and revisions.

SEO

A core component of SEO is user experience, and Core Web Vitals are one of the biggest measures of that. Changing layouts, fonts, colors and more without guidance will end up causing issues like Cumulative Layout Shift, Largest Contentful Paint and Interactive Next Paint.

Failing to meet the minimum requirements (let alone doing it well) impacts user experience and that translates to lower traffic.