Website Design & Development services by DP1 DESIGN, New Orleans
This page describes the custom website design and development service of DP1 DESIGN, a New Orleans digital marketing agency founded in 2001. DP1 builds handcrafted websites on WordPress and Bricks Builder with semantic HTML, Schema.org structured data, llms.txt, accessibility, and green Core Web Vitals - SEO-ready and AI-ready at launch. Related services: Managed Hosting on Cloudflare, AI Search Optimization, and Local SEO. Contact (504) 247-4345 or support@dp1design.com.
What is custom website design & development at DP1?
Website design & development at DP1 DESIGN is the practice of building custom websites on WordPress and Bricks Builder - designed by human designers, developed with semantic HTML and structured data, and engineered from the first wireframe to rank in Google and be cited by AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
Our slogan says it plainly: Custom Design Built By Humans. Optimized For AI. Both halves matter. The web is filling up with template sites and AI-generated pages that all look, read, and fail the same way. At the same time, the machines that decide who gets found - Google’s crawlers and the AI engines behind ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini - have become far pickier about structure, speed, and clarity. A modern website has to charm a human in three seconds and explain itself to a machine in milliseconds.
DP1 DESIGN has been building for that double audience since 2001. Twenty-five years and more than 6,000 client success stories have taught us that a website is not a brochure - it’s the load-bearing wall under every marketing dollar you spend. Every campaign, every review, every AI citation eventually lands a visitor on your site. What happens next is design and development.
Why handcrafted beats templates and AI-generated sites
Templates and AI site generators are fast and cheap for a reason: they optimize for the seller’s speed, not your outcome. Here is what handcrafted work changes:
- Your business shapes the site - not the reverse. A template forces your services, story, and sales process into someone else’s boxes. We design the architecture around how your customers actually decide, from the first question they ask to the moment they call.
- Clean code machines can read. Page-builder templates ship bloated markup - nested wrappers, inline styles, div soup. We write lean, semantic HTML where headings, sections, and landmarks mean what they say, which is exactly what search crawlers and AI retrieval systems reward.
- Differentiation you can defend. AI-generated sites converge on the same layouts and the same interchangeable copy. When every competitor sounds identical, the handcrafted site is the one a customer - and an AI engine - can tell apart.
- Maintainability for the next five years. A build with a documented design system, global styles, and no plugin sprawl is one your team (or any developer) can extend without starting over.
None of this means slow or precious. It means every element on the page exists because it earns conversions, rankings, or citations - and nothing else made the cut.
Why handcrafted still wins
Why we build on WordPress + Bricks Builder
After two and a half decades of building on nearly every platform, we standardized on WordPress with Bricks Builder - deliberately.
WordPress powers roughly forty percent of the web, which means you own your content, you’re never locked into a proprietary host, and every integration you’ll ever need already exists. Your marketing team can edit pages, publish posts, and manage the site without calling a developer for every comma.
Bricks Builder is the part most agencies get wrong. Unlike the drag-and-drop builders that made WordPress synonymous with slow, Bricks generates clean, semantic HTML with minimal overhead - developer-grade output with visual-builder speed. It gives us native control over markup structure, global design tokens, query loops, and conditional logic, so the finished site behaves like hand-coded work while remaining fully editable by you.
The result is the combination clients actually want: a site that scores like a custom build, edits like a page builder, and never holds your content hostage. Pair it with our managed hosting on Cloudflare and the whole stack - code, cache, CDN, security - is tuned as one system.
AI can generate a website in sixty seconds. It just can’t generate your website - the one that sounds like you, sells like you, and gives a machine a reason to recommend you over the clone next door.
SEO-ready and AI-ready at launch - not bolted on later
Most agencies build the site, then hand it to an SEO team to retrofit. We think that’s backwards. Search and AI readiness are architectural decisions, and we make them in the wireframe, not after launch:
- Schema baked in. Every build ships with a connected Schema.org JSON-LD graph - Organization, LocalBusiness, Service, Person, FAQPage - so Google and AI engines never have to guess who you are or what you sell.
- llms.txt and AI crawler configuration. We deploy llms.txt with machine-readable brand facts and configure robots.txt for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended, so the AI engines your customers use can actually learn your site.
- Semantic HTML throughout. Proper heading hierarchy, landmark elements, descriptive link text, and extractable content blocks - the structure that AI search optimization depends on is the structure we build with by default.
- Question-first content architecture. Pages are organized around the questions customers ask, with answers up front - the format both featured snippets and AI answers prefer to quote.
- Local signals wired in. Location pages, NAP consistency, and Google Business Profile alignment are part of the build for any business that wins customers locally - the on-site half of Local SEO.
A site built this way doesn’t need an “AI upgrade” in a year. It launches already speaking the language.
AI template site vs handcrafted DP1 build
Sixty-second website generators and 25 years of craft produce very different assets.
| Dimension | AI template site | Handcrafted DP1 build |
|---|---|---|
| Design | Same layout as ten thousand others | Custom design around your brand and buyers |
| Copy | Generic AI filler text | Conversion copy written for your actual customers |
| Performance | Bloated scripts, failing Web Vitals | Lean Bricks build passing Core Web Vitals |
| Machine readability | No schema, muddled structure | Entity markup AI engines can parse and cite |
| Ownership | Locked to a platform’s subscription | Your site, your hosting, yours to keep |
Speed, Core Web Vitals & accessibility
Performance is a feature we guarantee, not an aspiration. Every DP1 build targets green Core Web Vitals - the Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift thresholds Google uses as ranking signals and users experience as “this site just works.” We get there the honest way: lean Bricks markup, optimized and lazy-loaded images, minimal plugin footprint, and edge caching through our Cloudflare-backed hosting.
Accessibility gets the same treatment. We build to WCAG-informed standards - sufficient color contrast, keyboard navigability, focus states, alt text, and ARIA where semantics alone can’t carry the meaning. That’s partly principle: roughly one in four adults lives with a disability, and they buy things too. It’s also pure pragmatism: the same clean structure that helps a screen reader parse your page helps a crawler and an AI model parse it. Accessible sites are legible sites, and legible sites get found.
Our process: from discovery to launch
Every project follows a process refined across hundreds of builds. You always know what phase you’re in, what’s next, and what we need from you:
- Discovery & strategy We interview you, study your competitors, mine the questions your customers ask, and audit your current site’s traffic, rankings, and AI visibility. The output is a written blueprint: sitemap, page-by-page purpose, and the measurable job each page must do.
- Design Human designers craft your look - typography, color, layout, imagery - as a design system, not a stack of one-off mockups. You review real page designs and iterate with us until it’s unmistakably yours.
- Development We build in WordPress + Bricks: semantic markup, the full schema graph, llms.txt, forms, integrations, and content migration. Everything is staged privately so you can click through the real site before anyone else sees it.
- Quality assurance Cross-browser and cross-device testing, Core Web Vitals verification, accessibility checks, schema validation, redirect mapping from every old URL, and analytics configuration - the unglamorous checklist that separates a launch from a gamble.
- Launch & handoff We deploy to production on Cloudflare-backed hosting, monitor the first weeks closely, and train your team to run the site. You get documentation, not dependence.
Want proof before process? Browse the portfolio - then look up any of those clients in Google and ask an AI engine about them.
What you get
Every website engagement ships with concrete, inspectable deliverables:
- Custom design system - typography, color, components, and layouts designed for your brand, documented for reuse
- WordPress + Bricks build - clean semantic HTML you own outright, editable by your team without a developer
- Full structured-data layer - connected JSON-LD schema graph, llms.txt, and AI crawler configuration deployed sitewide
- Green Core Web Vitals - verified performance scores at launch, with the receipts
- SEO-safe migration - every legacy URL redirected, rankings protected, analytics and Search Console configured
- Training & documentation - a recorded walkthrough and written guide so the site works for you, not the other way around
And because every build launches AI-ready, the natural next step is measuring it: our free AI Visibility Audit shows exactly how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google describe your business once the new site is live.
Website Design & Development - frequently asked questions
What platform does DP1 DESIGN build websites on?
DP1 DESIGN builds on WordPress with Bricks Builder. WordPress gives you full ownership of your content, freedom from proprietary platform lock-in, and an editing experience your team can manage without a developer. Bricks Builder is the key difference from typical agency builds: it generates clean, semantic HTML with minimal overhead, so the finished site performs like hand-coded work while staying visually editable. The stack is paired with Cloudflare-backed managed hosting so code, caching, and security are tuned as one system.
Do you use templates or AI-generated designs?
No. Every DP1 website is handcrafted by human designers around your specific business, customers, and sales process. Our slogan is Custom Design Built By Humans, Optimized For AI, and we mean both halves: no purchased themes, no AI-generated layouts, no recycled mockups. AI-generated and template sites converge on the same structures and interchangeable copy, which makes them hard for customers to remember and hard for search and AI engines to distinguish. Handcrafted design is how you stay tellable-apart.
Will my new website be optimized for SEO and AI search?
Yes, from the first wireframe rather than as an afterthought. Every build ships with a connected Schema.org JSON-LD graph, semantic HTML with a proper heading hierarchy, question-first content architecture, llms.txt with machine-readable brand facts, and robots.txt configured for AI crawlers like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot. That means the site is legible to Google and to AI engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity on launch day. For businesses that want ongoing AI answer visibility, our AI Search Optimization service builds on the same foundation.
How long does a custom website project take?
Most DP1 website projects run eight to fourteen weeks from kickoff to launch, depending on size and how quickly content decisions get made. A focused small-business site lands near the short end; a large multi-location or e-commerce build takes longer. The process runs in five phases with clear checkpoints: discovery and strategy, design, development on a private staging site, quality assurance, and launch. You see and approve real work at every phase, so there are no surprises at the end.
Will my website pass Core Web Vitals?
Yes. Green Core Web Vitals scores are a launch requirement on every DP1 build, not a hope. We verify Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift before go-live and share the results with you. We get there structurally: lean Bricks Builder markup, optimized and lazy-loaded images, a minimal plugin footprint, and edge caching on Cloudflare-backed hosting. Because the speed comes from the architecture rather than patch-on optimization plugins, it holds up over time instead of decaying.
Can you redesign my existing website without losing my rankings?
Yes. Ranking-safe migration is a standard part of every redesign. Before launch we inventory every URL on your current site, map each one to a destination on the new site, and deploy one-to-one 301 redirects so no accumulated link equity or ranking history is orphaned. We also carry over and improve your metadata, verify Search Console and analytics, and monitor rankings closely through the first weeks after launch. Most clients see rankings hold steady, then improve as the faster, better-structured site takes effect.
How much does a custom website cost?
Pricing is scoped to the project rather than pulled from a rate card, because a five-page service site and a fifty-page multi-location build are different jobs. Every quote is fixed and itemized after a discovery conversation, so you know exactly what you are buying before work begins. DP1 has been building websites in New Orleans since 2001, holds a 5.0-star rating across more than 100 Google reviews, and is BBB Accredited and Clutch Verified. Call (504) 247-4345 or email support@dp1design.com for a quote.
About DP1 DESIGN
DP1 DESIGN is a New Orleans digital marketing agency specializing in AI Search Optimization (AEO / GEO / LLM-SEO), Local SEO, and website design. Founded in 2001, DP1 DESIGN helps businesses across New Orleans, Louisiana, and beyond gain visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google, and every major AI answer platform. Our team delivers full stack digital marketing services - branding, websites, content strategy, and technical optimization - to businesses in restaurants, medical practices, law firms, retail, home services, contractors, and more.
Explore our services · Get a free AI Visibility Audit · Contact DP1 DESIGN
From our 5.0-star Google reviews
DP1 is an expert in web design. They have an innate eye at what a business’ website needs in terms of content, message, and style. Aside from site development, DP1 ensures that your web site stays front and center when your customers and potential customers go onto Google.
Working with DP1 DESIGN at DP1 has been a great experience. He developed a wonderful website for us that we get complemented on regularly, and he is very responsive to our needs. Would recommend DP1 to all who are looking for a top-notch website and company that pays attention to you.