Website design in Crown Point, Indiana.
I checked every business website in Crown Point I could find, on a phone, and wrote down what was wrong with each one. 107 independent businesses, 82 of them with a website to open. Here is what that looked like, and what I charge to fix it.
Crown Point has a dead-domain problem
17 of the 82 Crown Point websites I opened returned nothing at all. Not slow, not ugly, not out of date. Nothing. In most cases the domain registration lapsed and was never renewed, so the address that is still printed on business cards, still listed on Google and still sitting in the map data now resolves to a browser error.
I checked every one of those against DNS rather than trusting the browser, because a site can fail to load for boring reasons. A domain with no nameservers and no address record is not having a bad afternoon.
What makes this the expensive failure is that the business almost never knows. You do not visit your own website. Your customers do, once, and then they go back to the search results.
Check yours in thirty seconds. Type your own web address into your phone, from mobile data rather than the shop wifi. If you get an error, find your registrar login. A lapsed domain can usually be recovered for the ordinary renewal fee if you move quickly, and gets much harder after that.
Every fault I recorded in Crown Point
Counted across the 82 Crown Point sites that had an address to open. Most sites had more than one problem, so these do not add to 82.
| What was wrong | Sites in Crown Point |
|---|---|
| No meta description, so Google writes the snippet | 19 |
| Did not return a usable page | 15 |
| Twelve or more pieces of text under 12px | 13 |
| Downloads more than 4MB | 12 |
| No favicon, so the browser tab is blank | 12 |
| No main heading | 11 |
| Phone number printed as text, so it cannot be tapped | 9 |
| Copyright two or more years out of date | 6 |
| Scrolls sideways on a phone | 5 |
| Hosted on a site builder that has shut down | 4 |
| Almost no readable text on the page | 3 |
| Took over six seconds to load | 3 |
| No mobile viewport tag, so it opens at desktop width | 2 |
| No HTTPS, so browsers label it Not secure | 1 |
| No page title at all | 1 |
| Laid out with HTML tables, a pre-2005 technique | 1 |
The 25 businesses in Crown Point with no website I could find include 3 companys, 2 laboratorys, 2 post depots, 2 pubs and 2 restaurants.
The method, the full seventeen checks and the same numbers for every other town are in the full audit.
What a Crown Point 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.
A fair amount of my Crown Point work is replacing a site whose domain lapsed, which means recovering or re-registering the domain first. 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 Crown Point can rot
17 Crown Point web addresses in this study returned nothing at all, and that is the failure a static site is built to make impossible. 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.
9 miles away, and that changes nothing
I am in Valparaiso, about 9 miles from Crown Point. 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 Lake County customer types into a phone, and I am not going to describe your trade wrongly.
If one of the 107 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.