Honest comparison
Joeckel Design vs North Country Website Design
North Country serves much of the same U.P. territory we do — Iron Mountain, Escanaba, Marquette and northern Wisconsin — with low-cost WordPress sites built on the Divi theme. The honest contrast is speed and maintenance: a Divi/WordPress site versus a hand-built site that loads faster and has no plugin stack to keep patched.
Cost at a glance
North Country Website Design
Quoted / packaged
- Custom WordPress sitequoted — not published
- Hosting & maintenancequoted
Full-service — but billed as an up-front project plus changes at agency rates, on the agency's timeline.
Joeckel Design
$49–$149/mo, build free
- Starter$49/mo
- Growth$99/mo
- Pro$149/mo
Free build/scope. Done-for-you. Cancel anytime.
What North Country Website Design does well
We're not here to bash. North Country Website Design is the right choice for some people. Here's where it earns its sticker price.
- ✓Serves the U.P. + northern Wisconsin — real regional coverage
- ✓Full service: WordPress sites, eCommerce, logo/graphic design, SEO, ADA work
- ✓Positions on affordability ("low cost, high quality")
Where North Country Website Design falls short
- ✗Built on WordPress with the Divi theme — Divi is notorious for heavy page output and shortcode lock-in that slows mobile load
- ✗WordPress + Divi means perpetual theme/plugin/core updates and a larger security surface
- ✗Pricing is not published, so cost is unknown until a sales conversation
- ✗Divi sites are hard to migrate off cleanly — the layout is tied to the theme
Hidden costs to watch
- ·Unpublished project cost — quoted per job
- ·Hosting/maintenance billed separately
- ·Divi license / premium plugins carry renewals
What North Country Website Design customers actually complain about
"My Divi site loads slowly on phones"
"I can't move my site without rebuilding the whole layout"
Live Client · Real Numbers
This is what we ship instead
Lighthouse mobile audit of wayneswalleyes.com, a real paying client (Wayne's Walleye World Guide Service — 2024 World Champion walleye guide). Run the audit yourself at pagespeed.web.dev. Typical North Country Website Design output is in a different league.
Performance
Accessibility
Best Practices
SEO
0.7s
First Contentful Paint
0.7s
Largest Contentful Paint
0ms
Total Blocking Time
0
Cumulative Layout Shift
1.1s
Speed Index
Where Joeckel Design wins, head-to-head
- ★No WordPress, no Divi — hand-built modern code that loads fast and isn't locked to a theme
- ★Lighthouse 95+ mobile out of the box
- ★Free build + flat $49–$149/mo with updates included
- ★Same U.P. coverage — but you work directly with the person who builds it
Ready for the real version?
No credit card. Cancel anytime.
Frequently asked questions
How is Joeckel Design different from North Country Website Design?＋
Both serve the U.P. and northern Wisconsin. North Country builds on WordPress with the Divi theme; Joeckel hand-codes a lightweight modern site with no theme or plugin stack — faster on mobile, nothing to patch, and not locked to a page builder. Joeckel also builds for free and charges a flat monthly fee that includes updates.