Web Design and Hosting for Mabank and Cedar Creek Lake

A web company that has been serving Cedar Creek Lake since 2003

Mabank.net has been putting small businesses around Cedar Creek Lake online since 2003. That is the whole description. We register domain names, host websites, build sites for people who need one built, fix sites that were built badly by someone else, and answer the phone when something breaks on a Saturday afternoon in the middle of boating season.

The businesses we work with are the ones that make this part of Texas run: a marina on the west shore, a septic contractor working out of a truck, a boutique on TX-334, a church office in Kemp, a dock builder who gets most of his work from weekenders, a family farm outside Mabank that started selling direct. None of them are technology companies. None of them want to become one. What they want is a website that loads, an email address at their own domain that does not land in a spam folder, and a straight answer when they ask whether the thing they were just cold-called about is worth buying.

We are based in Kaufman, about twenty-one miles up US-175 from Mabank, and we serve the ring of towns around the lake. That is stated on the page you are reading rather than buried, because it matters and because we would rather you hear it from us.

Who this is for, and who it is not

This is for the business with somewhere between one and thirty employees, a real customer base within about forty miles, and a website that is either absent, embarrassing, or quietly broken in a way nobody has looked at in three years. It is for the owner who has been paying a monthly fee for something since 2019 and cannot remember what the fee is for. It is for the nonprofit or church office where the website is one volunteer's third job.

It is not for a venture-backed startup that needs a design system. It is not for a national brand that needs an enterprise content platform. Those are good businesses to be in and they are not this one.

There is also a category of visitor we would rather send away happy than sign up unhappy. If you already have hosting that works, a domain in your own name, and a site you can update, you do not need to move anything. If you are a one-person trade business with no website at all and your customers find you by word of mouth and a Facebook page, the first thing to fix is a complete Google Business Profile, not a website. We will tell you that, and we will tell you it before there is an invoice attached to the conversation.

What makes us different from the companies that rank for this

Search for web design in Mabank, Texas and most of what comes back is not from Texas. The pattern is familiar to anyone who has looked closely: a company somewhere else generates a page for every town in the country, swaps the town name into the same paragraphs, buys some ads, and collects the form fill. The page mentions Cedar Creek Lake because a script inserted it. The company has never driven TX-198. The person who eventually calls you back is a salesperson working from a list, and the work itself is subcontracted somewhere you will never be told about.

That model is not illegal and it is not always bad work. It is simply not local, and the difference shows up in the details. A vendor who has been here knows that a business physically in Gun Barrel City can have a perfectly valid mailing address that reads Mabank, because of how the ZIP codes are drawn. A vendor who has been here knows that the lake economy has a season, that a dock builder's website matters most in March and a tax preparer's matters most in January, and that a marina's worst week to launch a redesign is Memorial Day weekend.

We write our own pages. We do not generate them. Every town page on this site says something different about that town, because the towns are different, and the ones with almost no search demand say so instead of pretending.

The people behind it

Mabank.net is owned and operated by Hartzer Consulting, LLC. Bill Hartzer founded it in 2003 to provide hosting and web design to businesses in Mabank and the surrounding area, and has been working in search since 1996 — long enough to have watched several generations of search engines rise, change their rules, and in some cases disappear entirely.

That background matters here for an unglamorous reason. Most of the money wasted on small-business websites is wasted on things that sound technical to a buyer who has no way to evaluate them. Knowing how search actually works is mostly useful for knowing what does not work, and for being able to explain, in ordinary sentences, why the thing you were pitched will not do what the pitch said it would.

We say "we" throughout this site because a business is more than one person, and because that is how it has read since 2003. When you call, though, you are talking to someone in Texas who knows your account, not to a queue.

How we work

We start by asking what you actually need, which is frequently less than what you were expecting to buy. A first conversation usually covers three things: where your domain name is currently registered and whose name it is in, where the site is hosted now and whether anyone still has the login, and what a good week of new customers looks like for you. Those three answers determine almost everything else.

From there the work is either a project with an end date, an ongoing arrangement, or nothing at all. We are comfortable with all three outcomes. Hosting runs month to month or annually with no long-term contract, migration of an existing site is included rather than billed, and most sites go live within a day of signup. If you decide to leave, you take your files and your domain with you, because they were always yours.

There is no minimum engagement to ask a question. If you are trying to work out whether the renewal notice in your inbox is legitimate, or whether the company that built your site in 2016 still controls your domain, call and ask. Those conversations take ten minutes and they have saved people a great deal of money and aggravation.