About Mabank.net

Founded in 2003 to put local businesses online

Mabank.net started in 2003 for a simple reason: businesses in Mabank and the towns around Cedar Creek Lake needed hosting and websites, and the options available to them were either a national company that had never heard of the place or a nephew with a copy of FrontPage. Neither one answered the phone in year three.

The work has changed a great deal since then. Sites are built differently, search engines behave differently, mail is far harder to deliver reliably than it was, and the security picture is not remotely what it was in 2003. What has not changed is the shape of the job: register the domain in the owner's name, put the site somewhere it stays up, make the email work, keep the certificate current, and give a straight answer when somebody asks whether the thing they were just pitched is worth buying.

We still do all of that for businesses around this lake — marinas and dock builders, trades, retail on the TX-334 strip, restaurants, churches, farms and nonprofits — as well as for clients well outside the area who came to us for search work and stayed.

Bill Hartzer

Mabank.net was founded by Bill Hartzer, who has been working in search since 1996, with a background in computer science. That start date is worth pausing on: it predates Google. The web he learned to work on had directories that human beings maintained by hand, search engines that no longer exist, and no established discipline for any of this. Everything since has been watched from the inside as it happened.

He is recognized in the industry for work in search engine optimization and in domain names — an unusual pairing, and a useful one, because a great many of the worst problems that land on a small business are domain problems wearing a marketing costume. A site that vanished after a migration, a business locked out of its own name by a former developer, a brand that lost its traffic when a domain was moved carelessly: those are all fixable, and they are all easier to prevent than to fix.

Over that period the work has spanned Fortune 500 brands, venture-funded startups, and local businesses with one location and one phone line. The last of those is the reason this site exists. The problems are the same problems at a different scale, and the smallest clients frequently get the worst advice, because they are the ones with no way to check it.

We write as "we" throughout this site because Mabank.net is a business rather than a personal blog, and because that is how it has read since 2003. This page names a person because a company that will not tell you who is behind it is telling you something.

Who owns and operates this

Mabank.net is owned and operated by Hartzer Consulting, LLC. The same company also owns and operates MabankOnline.com, a community-facing site for the Mabank area.

We mention the ownership structure for a practical reason rather than a legal one. When you buy hosting, you are trusting somebody with the piece of your business that customers use to find you, and you are entitled to know who that somebody actually is. A hosting brand that cannot be traced to a named company is a brand you should ask harder questions about, particularly if it is the one holding your domain registration.

Contracts, invoices and account records are in the name of Hartzer Consulting, LLC. Domain names we register for clients are registered in the client's name, with the client as registrant, which is where they belong.

Based in Kaufman, twenty miles from Mabank

We are based at 100 Kings Fort Parkway, Suite 105-334, Kaufman, Texas — roughly twenty-one miles from Mabank, about a twenty-five minute drive down US-175. We do not have a walk-in office in Mabank, and we do not claim one.

That is stated on this page rather than hidden because the alternative is worse in every direction. Claiming a storefront in a town where a company only holds a mailbox is a violation of Google's own rules, it invites a competitor to report the listing, and the outcome is a suspension with no guaranteed appeal. It is also just untrue, and untrue things about your own address are a strange foundation for a relationship built on trust.

Here is why it has never affected how the work gets done. Practically all of this work happens through a browser, no matter who performs it or where they sit. Registering a domain, migrating a site, configuring mail records, issuing a certificate, rebuilding a page, correcting a business profile, working out why a contact form stopped delivering — none of that improves by having the vendor down the street. It did not in 2003 and it does not now.

The parts of the job that genuinely benefit from being in the room are the parts we drive for: photographing a business that needs real pictures instead of stock images, sitting across a table with an owner who thinks better that way, and the occasional decision that wants everyone present. Kaufman to any town on this lake is a short drive, and shorter than what many of our clients drive to work.

What being twenty miles out actually buys you is a vendor who knows the area without being entangled in it. We know the county lines run through Mabank, that a Gun Barrel City business can have a Mabank mailing address, that the lake has a season, and that Trade Days reorganizes Canton once a month. We also have no stake in anyone's local politics, which makes it easier to tell you what we honestly think.

Work we can point to

We name three sites publicly, and only three, because everything else is either under an arrangement where the client would rather not be named or is work where our contribution is not ours alone to claim.

• EmolaFarm.com — Emola Farm, in Mabank.
• HCFoodPantry.org — the Henderson County Food Pantry.
• MabankOnline.com — our own community site for the Mabank area.

You will not find a wall of logos on this site, and you will not find testimonials with first names and stock photographs attached. There is a reason for that beyond modesty: those things are trivially manufactured, every buyer knows it, and a page of them communicates nothing that can be checked. Three sites you can open in a browser communicate more.

If you want to talk to somebody we work with before making a decision, ask. We will find a client who is willing, in a trade close enough to yours to be useful, and put you directly in touch. That is worth more than a quotation we typed ourselves.

How we think about this work

Four things govern how we operate, and they are all checkable against the rest of this site.

We do not guarantee rankings, traffic or revenue. Nobody can. Search engines do not sell placement in their organic results, they change how they work continuously, and any promise of position is a promise about something the person making it does not control. A local buyer here has been cold-called by people who guarantee page one, which is precisely why we will not.

We tell you when you do not need the thing. Every service page on this site carries a section arguing against buying it, naming the kind of business that should not. That is not a rhetorical device. In a market this small, a lot of what gets sold is unnecessary, and the fastest way to be worth calling is to be the vendor who says so.

You own your assets. Your domain, your files, your content, your business profile, your accounts. If you leave, you leave with all of it, and we will help the next provider rather than obstruct them.

We are specific about cost drivers rather than vague about price. Hosting prices are published on this site. Project work is quoted after looking at what exists, because a quote issued before that is a guess with a number attached.