Hot Springs, Arkansas
A web designer twenty minutes from downtown
I’m not in Hot Springs. I’m in Malvern, about twenty minutes down 270 — closer than the Little Rock agencies and a great deal closer than whoever answers the phone at a national outfit. Close enough that if you want to sit down and look at your website together, I can be there before lunch.
The local picture
What’s actually different about a Hot Springs website
A website for a business here has a harder job than one in a normal town, and it’s worth being specific about why.
Half your customers are on Central Avenue with a phone in their hand
They don’t know the town, they’re deciding in the next four minutes, and they will not scroll. Wrong hours, six seconds to load on a weak downtown signal, or no phone number above the fold — they’ve tapped back and picked somebody else. A site that works fine on your office desktop can be losing most of that traffic without ever showing you a symptom.
The year has a shape here it doesn’t have elsewhere
Oaklawn’s live meet runs through winter into spring and the town fills and empties around it. The lakes do the opposite. If your website says the same thing in January that it says in July, it’s out of step with your own business half the year — and the places that update seasonally are catching that traffic instead.
Hot Springs Village is a different market in the same zip code
Thousands of retirees who research carefully, read the whole page, want a phone number and a real name, and are far likelier to fill in a form than send a message. A site built for downtown foot traffic serves them badly, and the reverse is just as true. Most businesses here need both, and most sites I look at do neither deliberately.
The visitor bureau sends real traffic
Being listed correctly on hotsprings.org and with the Chamber is worth more here than in most towns — which also means a broken or outdated link on those listings costs you more than it would anywhere else.
What I found
I spent a week reading Hot Springs websites
Not scanning them with a tool — opening them and reading what was actually on the page. I’m not naming anybody. Here’s honestly what I found.
- Placeholder text still sitting on the homepageThe sample wording a website builder drops in so the page isn’t empty — “your tagline here”, “I’m a description, click to edit me” — left live, in some cases for years.
- Contact forms that were never connectedThe form looks right, accepts the message, says thank you. It was never linked to an email address, so nothing arrives. Every inquiry since has gone nowhere and nobody knows, because a form that fails quietly gives you no symptom at all.
- No phone number where it mattersBusinesses advertising emergency call-outs with no number on the homepage, and shops whose contact page shows raw code where the phone number should be.
- Dates that give the game awayCopyright lines reading 2014 and 2020. Summer specials still running in late September. A “latest news” section whose latest news is from another decade. It reads as closed even when you’re busy.
- Lapsed domains picked up by somebody elseMore than one old web address in this town has been let go, re-registered overseas, and now serves gambling pages — while official local listings still link to it.
None of these are businesses doing badly. They’re busy, well-run places that paid somebody for a website once and reasonably assumed it was finished. Cheap site builders are very good at getting eighty percent of the way and then leaving the last twenty percent — the part where the form works and the phone number shows — sitting there in public for years.
If you’d like to know what your own site looks like from the outside, I’ll tell you for nothing. Whether you hire me afterwards is up to you.
How it works
One person builds it, hosts it and answers the phone
Not three companies pointing at each other. When something breaks on a Saturday night, I’m the one who fixes it, and I already know where everything is.
- Built for phones firstBecause that’s where your customers are standing.
- Hosted on my own hardwareWith a backup taken before anything gets changed.
- Kept up to date every monthWordPress, plugins and security patches, without you thinking about it.
- Set up properly for searchIncluding the structured information Google and the AI assistants read to answer questions about local businesses.
- Forms that are testedAnd actually deliver. Which is not as common as it should be.
- Your Google Business Profile sortedFor most local businesses it brings in more than the website does.
What it costs
WEBSITE, HOSTING & UPKEEP
No build fee. That covers building it, hosting it on my servers, keeping it updated and backed up, and the small changes you’ll want along the way.
WITH EMAIL AND EXTRAS
Business email on your own domain and the services that go with it, depending on what you actually need. Custom software and portal work is quoted separately.
The work
Some of what I’ve built
Six of the thirty-odd sites I build, host and look after. Different trades, different jobs, same person answering the phone.
Arkansas Reading Vine
Literacy nonprofit working out of the adult education building in Malvern. Site, donations and the internal systems the tutors use.
Automated Boating Solutions
Launch site for a solar Bluetooth fender system. Built to explain a product nobody had seen before and take quote requests.
Wolf Creek Lodge
Wedding and event venue. Photo-led, because for a venue the pictures are the product and the inquiry form is the sale.
Fast Wrapz
Custom vehicle wraps, banners and signs. A gallery-first build for a business judged entirely on what its work looks like.
Precision Machine & Metal Fabrication
Full-service machine shop. Written for engineers and buyers who want capability and tolerances, not marketing.
Charlie McDaniel’s Cleaning & Installation
Family-owned since 1982. Phone number above the fold, free-estimate button on every screen, because that is the whole job.
Every one of these is hosted on my own servers, backed up before anything changes, and updated every month.
Who you’d be dealing with
Being from Malvern is the point
I moved here from Mississippi, where I spent more than twenty years building websites for machine shops, hose suppliers, embroidery outfits, radio stations, storage yards and a charity or two. Thirty-odd of those sites are still running on my servers today.
You get somebody local enough to turn up, small enough to care whether it works, and experienced enough to have already made the mistakes on somebody else’s site rather than yours.
Closer to home
I build and host the website and internal systems for Arkansas Reading Vine, which works out of the adult education building here in Malvern. They train tutors to teach adults and children to read, and teach financial sense and computer skills alongside it, grounded in Bible study.
I’m vice president of the board as well as the one who builds the site — so I sit on the other side of that table too, the side where somebody has to justify what a website costs and whether it’s earning its keep. That’s made me a good deal more careful about what I recommend to anybody else.
No charge, no obligation
Have a look at your site with me
Call or text and I’ll tell you honestly what’s working on your website and what isn’t. If it’s fine, I’ll say so. If it isn’t, I’ll tell you what it would take to fix and what it would cost, and you can decide from there.
662-422-1809Jeff McDaniel · JM Marketing · Malvern, Arkansas
Serving Hot Springs, Hot Springs Village, Benton, Bryant and Malvern