Home builders
Plans and finishes get compared side by side from another state, and the photographs that sell the work are what make the pages slow.
Home builders hosting
St. George, UT
Web Hosting in St. George, UT
A page that is hard to read does not produce a complaint. It produces nothing at all, which is why the cost of it never appears on anything you look at. Type set too small, grey on white, a number that takes three attempts to dial: each one loses somebody who then tells you nothing. That is a commercial problem long before it is any other kind.
AldoMedia is not in St. George. The work is done from Buffalo, New York. There is no Utah office, no local number to ring and nobody who will drive over and sit down with you. Setting hosting up, moving a site across and answering when something breaks all happen at a distance, which is how hosting has always been done.
The customer who never tells you the page was too small
Nobody writes in to say the text was too small. Nobody rings to report that they pressed the number twice and got a map. They close the page, open the next result, and the event leaves no trace. That silence costs more in a town still filling up with people who arrived to retire, because a household that unpacked last spring has no plumber, no dentist and no roofer yet, and picks all three off a screen.
So treat this as a sales question rather than a rules question. Accessibility as an obligation is real enough, but that framing tends to produce the least somebody can defend. The commercial framing produces a better page, and it matters more in a market that keeps adding households, because that market keeps adding firms to serve them. A newcomer has no long relationship and nobody to ask, so more of the choosing than usual is done cold.
Where a good share of the buying is done by people past sixty, that is not a marginal group to lose. Eyesight changes slowly and nobody revises their expectations to match. A reader in their seventies does not think of themselves as struggling with your website. They think your website is irritating, which is worse for you, because it attaches to your name. Somebody who moved in recently is meeting new neighbours constantly, so that verdict travels.
Most of these readers have already solved the problem at their end. They have turned the text size up on the phone, and they expect pages to honour it. A layout built at fixed sizes ignores that setting, or half honours it and pushes a heading through the edge of a button. Then there is what this part of the country does to a screen. Read outdoors in flat desert sun, pale grey type on white does not go grey. It goes blank.
Have somebody read the site the way a customer does
Send the address. We will tell you how it behaves with the phone's text size turned up, whether the number dials on the first press, what the page weighs and whether you can edit the words yourself. If it is already fine, we will say so.
Two people read the same page, and one of them is not in Utah
There is a second reader here that most sites are never drawn for. Much of the growth in this corner of the state is people arriving to retire, and when somebody moves across the country in their seventies, the research into local services is often done by an adult son or daughter still back where the family came from. They shortlist. The customer then reads whichever page survived, on a phone, at a text size they chose themselves.
Those two want different things from the one page. The one comparing has never set foot here and cannot tell from a map whether you are ten minutes from their mother or most of an hour, so your service area, your hours and a plain statement of what you do have to be findable without scrolling past a slideshow. The other needs type they can read and a number that dials.
What to check on your own site this week
- Open it on a phone with the system text size turned up two steps. If headings collide, buttons clip their own labels or the number vanishes behind a fixed bar, that is already what a good share of your readers see.
- Set the body text larger than the template handed you. Templates are drawn to look elegant in a screenshot, not to be read by somebody holding a phone at arm's length in a driveway.
- Look properly at grey text on white, then go outside and look again. Pale type has been the most popular design decision of the last decade, and in this much sun it is a direct cost.
- Make the number real text inside a dial link. Not a picture of a number, and not bare text somebody has to copy out by hand.
- Leave room around anything tappable. A finger is a blunt instrument, and two links a few pixels apart will be hit wrongly over and over.
The dialling part deserves its own sentence because it is so often half done. A number can be text, and look correct, and still do nothing when pressed. It can be a proper link and still be unreachable because a cookie notice is sitting over it. For somebody who moved here recently and has nobody to ask for a recommendation, that one press is the whole relationship so far. Test it on a real phone.
None of that is a hosting feature and it would be dishonest to sell it as one. It is how the pages are built. On a site read by those two people, it is worth more than every hosting decision further down this page.
Who holds the keys when a business grows this fast
Three things have to be in your name and are routinely held by three different people: the domain, the hosting account, and whatever tool the pages are edited in. It works for years, which is why nobody checks until the afternoon they need to change something.
Quick growth makes this worse rather than better. A firm that has trebled in a few years often started with a site built as a favour, by a relative or a first employee who has since moved on. The site is fine. The account holding it belongs to somebody with no particular reason to answer the phone, and the recovery address is an inbox nobody reads.
Check the registration first, because it is the only one of the three that cannot be rebuilt from what is already published. Log in to the registrar yourself. Confirm the company is the listed owner and that the contact address is one somebody currently reads. If it sits in another name, settle it while the request is still a favour rather than a negotiation. Where the previous builder has gone quiet, taking over a website sets out how to recover each piece.
The rest follows the same rule. If you cannot correct a wrong phone number on your own site this afternoon, without asking anyone's permission, fix that before the reading and contrast work above is worth starting.
We will handle the move
Copy, prove it, redirect anything that has to change, switch the domain last and keep the mail records intact. Nothing about how the site reads gets quietly redesigned on the way across.
Moving a site without throwing away what already works
Most businesses that get in touch are leaving something rather than starting something. A renewal doubled, a host slowed down, or the builder stopped replying. The mechanics are dull. Copy everything across, prove it on a temporary address, and repoint the domain last, so there is never a moment when your address points at nothing. Website migration covers that sequence.
Mail is what actually goes wrong. Somebody rebuilds the domain records for the website and does not carry the mail entries across, and enquiries disappear quietly before anybody works out why. Write down what exists first. Email migration deals with keeping mail alive through the change.
There is a second loss worth naming on this page. A move often turns into a redesign, because while it is open somebody suggests freshening it up. The new template arrives with small pale type, a slideshow and the number in the footer, and three years of patient improvement is undone by a design that photographs better. If the current site reads well, write down what makes it read well first. Sizes, colours, where the number sits.
Keep the addresses too. An established business has its web address printed on paperwork and in listings it does not control, and readers who type rather than search will type exactly what was printed. Redirect the pages that must change.
What gets billed alongside web hosting in St. George, UT
Hosting itself is usually the smallest figure on the bill. Around it sit a domain renewal, a certificate very often already included, an editing subscription, a backup add-on, a security add-on, and sometimes mail for addresses nobody uses.
Two of those are not optional. The domain has to be renewed and the certificate has to be valid, because a browser warning ends the visit before any of the reading argument gets a chance. A backup earns its money only once somebody has restored one and watched it come back. Website backups explains the difference between having backups and having tested them.
The charge peculiar to this argument is the accessibility overlay, a widget that drops a control onto the page offering larger text and stronger contrast. Some readers do reach for it. What it cannot do is change how the page looks when it first loads, and that is the only moment most people give you. Renting a button that offers to fix the type is not the same as setting the type correctly once.
A few pages of service text that change a few times a year do not need a large plan, and shared hosting sets out where the real limits start. Spending more earns its keep when people log in, when payments are taken, or when a morning offline costs you work the same day. Visitor numbers alone almost never justify it. What a website costs to run puts the whole bill in one place.
Trades we cover in this kind of economy
Three of the businesses whose websites do the most work in an economy that is growing, building and looking after people who have retired here.
Healthcare providers
Read by the patient and by a relative a long way off, on the same page, at two very different text sizes.
Healthcare providers hostingProperty management companies
Owners, tenants and short stay visitors all land on one site wanting three different things, and none of them will hunt for it.
Property management companies hostingEvery trade we cover is on hosting by industry, and every city on our locations page.
Common questions
St. George hosting questions
Will larger type and stronger contrast make our site look dated?
It is a fair worry and the answer is no, as long as somebody sets the sizes deliberately rather than dragging a slider until it looks big. Small pale type is a fashion, not a mark of quality, and the firms with the largest design budgets have been moving away from it for some time. What does look cheap is a page where the type has been enlarged without the spacing being adjusted, so the lines crowd each other. That is an hour of work, not a rebuild.
Many of our new customers moved to St. George recently and their families live elsewhere. Does that change the site?
Yes, though mostly in the writing rather than the hosting. Assume two readers. One is comparing you with two competitors on a laptop from another state, so your service area, your hours and a plain statement of what you do have to be findable without scrolling. The other is the customer, reading on a phone at a text size they set themselves, who wants a number that dials. Serve both on the one page, and do not build a separate site for either.
We pay monthly for a widget that adds a text size button to our pages. Worth keeping?
It depends what it is standing in for. As an extra control for readers who want it, fine. As a substitute for sensible defaults it fails, because it only helps somebody who notices the button and presses it, and the page has usually lost them before that. Look at what the page is like before anything is pressed. If that is already right, the widget is a convenience. If it is not, you are renting a patch over the actual fault.
Should we build a simplified second version of the site for older visitors?
No. Leave that idea alone and fix the one site. A second simplified version doubles the editing, goes stale inside a year, and quietly patronises the people it is aimed at, most of whom are online all day and want nothing more than legible type. Everything that helps an older reader, larger text, stronger contrast, room around the links, helps every other visitor as well. There is no version of this worth splitting in two.
Start with an honest look at what you have
Tell us what the site runs on, who can edit it, and who your customers actually are. We will tell you what to fix, what to leave alone, and whether the plan you already pay for is the right one.
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Or call 716-771-2536. We are in Buffalo, New York, so we answer Eastern time.