Where I work

I'm on the Emerald Coast. I know these towns, which means I know the difference between a Navarre customer and a Destin customer.

• Navarre
• Pensacola
• Gulf Breeze
• Destin
• Fort Walton Beach

Remote work accepted nationally. Most of the process happens over the phone and email anyway. Being local is a bonus, not a requirement.

Working here specifically

A site built for this coast has a different job than one built for a city that looks the same all year. Three things shape it.

Your year has two shapes

Spring break through summer, the population swells and the work is urgent, out-of-town, and often about a property nobody lives in. Come autumn it settles back to neighbours who will call you again. Those are two different customers reading the same website. The seasonal one is deciding in thirty seconds on a phone; the year-round one is checking whether you are the sort of outfit that answers. A site can speak to both, but only if someone thought about it.

Storm season is part of the calendar

June through November, the phone can go from quiet to unmanageable in a day. That is the moment your website earns its money, and it is also the moment a slow one costs you: everyone is searching on a phone, often on bad signal, sometimes on a generator. It is also the one week a year you genuinely need to change the site fast, to say you are booked, or safe, or taking emergency calls only.

A lot of your customers are not from here

Between the bases, the rentals, and people who bought a place they visit twice a year, plenty of the people hiring you have no idea who is reputable locally. They cannot ask a neighbour. They are going on what they can find in a search, which means the site is doing work that word of mouth does everywhere else.