Website design in Gary, Indiana.
I checked every business website in Gary I could find, on a phone, and wrote down what was wrong with each one. 225 independent businesses, 51 of them with a website to open. Here is what that looked like, and what I charge to fix it.
The problem in Gary is absence, not quality
Of the 225 independent businesses I found in Gary, 174 have no website that I could locate at all. That is 77.3% of them, and it is the highest proportion of any finding here. The 51 that do have a site are, on the whole, in reasonable shape.
So the useful thing to say about Gary is not that local websites are bad. It is that most businesses here are relying entirely on a Google listing, a Facebook page, or word of mouth. That works until somebody searches for what you do at nine in the evening and finds three competitors with a website and a price list.
An honest caveat. I could not find a website for these businesses. That is not the same as proving there is not one. Plenty of good sites were simply never recorded in the map data I started from. If yours is one of them, the count above is wrong by one and I would rather know.
Every fault I recorded in Gary
Counted across the 51 Gary sites that had an address to open. Most sites had more than one problem, so these do not add to 51.
| What was wrong | Sites in Gary |
|---|---|
| Did not return a usable page | 13 |
| No meta description, so Google writes the snippet | 11 |
| No favicon, so the browser tab is blank | 10 |
| Downloads more than 4MB | 8 |
| Copyright two or more years out of date | 8 |
| Phone number printed as text, so it cannot be tapped | 6 |
| Twelve or more pieces of text under 12px | 5 |
| Scrolls sideways on a phone | 4 |
| No main heading | 3 |
| Took over six seconds to load | 2 |
| Laid out with HTML tables, a pre-2005 technique | 2 |
| Hosted on a site builder that has shut down | 1 |
| No HTTPS, so browsers label it Not secure | 1 |
| No mobile viewport tag, so it opens at desktop width | 1 |
The 174 businesses in Gary with no website I could find include 9 bars, 11 car repairs, 9 conveniences, 13 fast foods and 15 hairdressers.
The method, the full seventeen checks and the same numbers for every other town are in the full audit.
What a Gary 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 of my work in Gary starts from nothing, which is the straightforward case: one page, live in a few days. 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 Gary can rot
Starting from nothing in Gary has one advantage: you never inherit somebody else's maintenance problem. 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.
13 miles away, and that changes nothing
I am in Valparaiso, about 13 miles from Gary. 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 225 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.