Website design in Chesterton, Indiana.
I checked every business website in Chesterton I could find, on a phone, and wrote down what was wrong with each one. 60 independent businesses, 45 of them with a website to open. Here is what that looked like, and what I charge to fix it.
Chesterton businesses have websites. They break on a phone.
This town is the opposite of the pattern elsewhere. Only 15 of 60 businesses here have no website, which is low. But of the 45 sites I opened, 18 had something wrong with them specifically at phone width: a page that scrolls sideways, a phone number that cannot be tapped, text under 12 pixels, or several megabytes of photographs for a single page.
Those faults are invisible on the laptop the site was signed off on. They are the whole experience on the device most of your customers are actually holding.
The ten second version. Open your own site on your own phone and try to tap your phone number. If nothing happens, that is a one line fix and it is costing you calls today.
Every fault I recorded in Chesterton
Counted across the 45 Chesterton sites that had an address to open. Most sites had more than one problem, so these do not add to 45.
| What was wrong | Sites in Chesterton |
|---|---|
| No meta description, so Google writes the snippet | 13 |
| Phone number printed as text, so it cannot be tapped | 12 |
| No main heading | 11 |
| Twelve or more pieces of text under 12px | 11 |
| Copyright two or more years out of date | 8 |
| Downloads more than 4MB | 6 |
| Did not return a usable page | 4 |
| No favicon, so the browser tab is blank | 4 |
| Scrolls sideways on a phone | 3 |
| Almost no readable text on the page | 2 |
| Took over six seconds to load | 2 |
| No HTTPS, so browsers label it Not secure | 1 |
| No mobile viewport tag, so it opens at desktop width | 1 |
The 15 businesses in Chesterton with no website I could find include 2 financial advisors and 4 restaurants.
The method, the full seventeen checks and the same numbers for every other town are in the full audit.
What a Chesterton website costs here
A flat $499 to $899, paid once. Not a monthly plan, not a retainer, and no percentage of anything later. The domain and the site are registered in your name from the first day, so if you ever want to walk away you take the whole thing with you.
Most Chesterton businesses already have something. Rebuilding an existing site properly usually costs the same as starting fresh. Most builds take two to ten days. What is included and what counts as extra is on the scope and terms page, published before you pay rather than after, and what a website actually costs around here sets that price against the alternatives.
Why nothing I build for Chesterton can rot
Almost every business in Chesterton already has a site, and 18 of them have quietly developed a fault nobody signed off on. The sites I build have no plugins, no database and no update cycle, so there is nothing in them that can break by itself while you are not looking. Here is the longer version of that argument, including what actually goes wrong with WordPress.
About 7 miles up the road
I am in Valparaiso, roughly 7 miles from Chesterton, which is close enough that I have been in most of these places. I work online, so there is no salesman coming to your shop and no appointment to keep. Being local matters for a different reason: I know which towns these are, I know what a Porter County customer types into a phone, and I am not going to describe your trade wrongly.
If one of the 60 is yours
Tell me the name of your business and I will tell you exactly what I found when I opened your site, whether or not you ever hire me. There are five example builds on the front page you can open right now.