Website design in Merrillville, Indiana.
I checked every business website in Merrillville I could find, on a phone, and wrote down what was wrong with each one. 110 independent businesses, 78 of them with a website to open. Here is what that looked like, and what I charge to fix it.
The problem in Merrillville is absence, not quality
Of the 110 independent businesses I found in Merrillville, 32 have no website that I could locate at all. That is 29.1% of them, and it is the highest proportion of any finding here. The 78 that do have a site are, on the whole, in reasonable shape.
So the useful thing to say about Merrillville 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 Merrillville
Counted across the 78 Merrillville sites that had an address to open. Most sites had more than one problem, so these do not add to 78.
| What was wrong | Sites in Merrillville |
|---|---|
| Did not return a usable page | 16 |
| Downloads more than 4MB | 16 |
| Twelve or more pieces of text under 12px | 16 |
| No main heading | 11 |
| No meta description, so Google writes the snippet | 10 |
| No favicon, so the browser tab is blank | 10 |
| Scrolls sideways on a phone | 5 |
| Took over six seconds to load | 4 |
| Laid out with HTML tables, a pre-2005 technique | 4 |
| Almost no readable text on the page | 3 |
| Copyright two or more years out of date | 3 |
| Phone number printed as text, so it cannot be tapped | 2 |
| No HTTPS, so browsers label it Not secure | 1 |
| No page title at all | 1 |
| No mobile viewport tag, so it opens at desktop width | 1 |
The 32 businesses in Merrillville with no website I could find include 2 clothess, 2 fast foods, 2 furnitures, 2 opticians and 2 restaurants.
The method, the full seventeen checks and the same numbers for every other town are in the full audit.
What a Merrillville 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 Merrillville 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 Merrillville can rot
Starting from nothing in Merrillville 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.
9 miles away, and that changes nothing
I am in Valparaiso, about 9 miles from Merrillville. 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 110 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.