Website, Hosting and SEO Services

Three groups, in the order things actually happen

Everything on this page falls into one of three groups, and they are listed in the order a business normally encounters them rather than the order that would be most profitable to sell.

Getting online is the foundation: a domain name registered in your own name, hosting that keeps the site available, email at your own domain instead of a free address, and the build itself — whether that is a new site, a rebuild of something dated, or a rescue of a site whose original developer has vanished.

Being found is what happens after the site exists: search engine optimization, local search work, and the Google Business Profile that decides whether you appear on the map when somebody nearby searches for what you sell. For a lot of businesses around Cedar Creek Lake, the profile matters more than the website does, and we would rather say that plainly than sell around it.

Keeping it running is the unglamorous part that determines whether any of the above still works in two years: maintenance and software updates, SSL certificates that renew before they expire, page speed, backups, and analytics that tell you something you can act on.

Getting online: the foundation nobody should own but you

The single most consequential thing in this group has nothing to do with design. It is whose name the domain is registered in. A domain name is the only asset in this list that is genuinely irreplaceable — you can rebuild a website in a week and move hosts in an afternoon, but a domain registered in your former designer's name, with his email on the account, is a problem that can take months and a lawyer to unwind. Before you spend a dollar on anything else, confirm that the registrant contact on your domain is you or your company, and that you can log in to the registrar yourself.

Hosting is the second piece: the server that holds your files and serves them to visitors. For a brochure site, the difference between one competent shared host and another is small, and most of the specifications used to sell hosting are irrelevant at this scale. What matters is that the site stays up, that backups exist and have been tested, that the certificate renews, and that a person answers when it does not.

Email at your own domain is the piece most often skipped and most often regretted. An address at a free provider tells every recipient that the business either did not know it could have its own or did not think it worth the trouble, and it makes the address impossible to transfer when an employee leaves.

The build itself varies more than anything else in cost, and it varies for reasons you can predict: how many pages there are, whether you have the text and photographs already or need them created, whether anything on the site takes money or takes bookings, and how much of your existing content has to be carried across.

Being found: what search actually does around here

Search work divides into two things that get sold as one. Organic optimization is about pages: what your site says, how it is structured, whether search engines can read and understand it, and whether anyone else on the internet has reason to reference it. Local search is about the business entity: your Google Business Profile, the consistency of your name, address and phone number across the places they appear, your categories, your photographs and your reviews.

They are not the same discipline and they do not respond to the same work. Rewriting a page does not move a map listing. Fixing a business profile does not make a page rank. Any proposal that treats them as one product is either careless or deliberately vague.

The other thing to understand is proximity. Google's own documentation describes local results as a function of relevance, distance and prominence, and distance is measured from the person searching, not from you. That single mechanic explains most local search disappointment and most of the promises that go unmet. You can improve relevance and prominence. Nobody can move your building.

We do not guarantee rankings, traffic or revenue, and we would be suspicious of anyone who does. What is achievable is describable: a complete and correct profile, pages that answer the questions your customers actually type, a site that loads quickly on a phone at a boat ramp, and the removal of the technical problems that were holding the site back.

Keeping it running: the part that gets skipped

Most of the broken sites we are called about were not hacked in a dramatic way and were not abandoned on purpose. They stopped working because something expired, something updated, or something was never renewed by a person who no longer works there.

Certificate lifetimes have been getting shorter for years, and the courtesy expiry emails that used to arrive are not guaranteed to arrive anymore. A certificate that lapses turns a working site into a full-page browser warning with no notice. Automated renewal is not a luxury feature; it is the difference between a site that works and one that frightens visitors away.

Software maintenance matters most for sites running a content management system with plugins. The security picture has shifted in recent years: unpatched software, rather than a stolen password, is now the more common way small sites get compromised, and the overwhelming majority of the vulnerabilities reported in the WordPress ecosystem are in plugins rather than in the core software. The practical consequence is that a site with fourteen plugins, four of which are no longer maintained by their authors, is carrying a risk that no amount of password discipline addresses.

Backups deserve one blunt sentence. We take them, and you should still be able to lay hands on a copy of your own site that does not depend on us being reachable.

How to tell which of the three you actually need

This is the most useful section on this page, so here it is without hedging: most small businesses around this lake need far less than they are sold.

Work through it in order.

1. Can a stranger find your phone number, address and hours in ten seconds without a website? If no, that is the whole job, and it is a Google Business Profile plus consistent listings — an afternoon of work, not a monthly bill.
2. Do you have a domain in your own name that you can log in to? If no, fix that before anything else, regardless of who you fix it with.
3. Does your site load on a phone, say what you sell, and give a way to get in touch above the fold? If yes, you probably do not need a redesign. You may need three pages rewritten.
4. Are people already finding you for the thing you do, in the town you are in? If yes, an ongoing search retainer is buying you competition that does not exist here. Put the money into photographs, reviews, or the phone being answered.
5. Does the site take money, take bookings, or hold customer information? If no, you do not need a paid firewall subscription, a malware-scanning plan, a payment-security scan or a trust seal. There is nothing on the site to steal.

If you are the only septic contractor in Payne Springs and you already show up when somebody searches for one, you do not need a search retainer. You need your phone number correct in three places and your hours current. That is an afternoon, not a monthly bill, and we will happily do just that afternoon.

What drives the cost, since we will not pretend it is fixed

Hosting is the predictable part: a recurring fee that depends on how much room and how much mail you need, billed monthly or annually. Project work is not predictable in the same way, and anyone quoting a website before seeing the current one is quoting a guess.

Four things drive the cost of a build more than anything else. The first is content: whether the words and photographs exist, or whether they have to be written and taken. The second is page count, though only loosely — being billed by the page is a poor deal on any site over about ten pages, because pages are the cheapest part of the work. The third is whether the site does anything beyond inform: a store, a booking system, a member area or a form that has to talk to something else. The fourth is the state of what exists now, because migrating a clean site is quick and untangling a neglected one is not.

What we will not do is quote a monthly figure that bundles a "free" website into a three- or four-year commitment. That is a financed website with the interest hidden in the payment, and at the end of it you frequently do not own the files. Our hosting has no long-term contract, and the site is yours.