Pyle Bros. Building Stone Contractors

About the Client

Pyle Bros. Building Stone Contractors is a family-owned stone masonry contractor located in Mount Pleasant Mills, Pennsylvania, working across the state on natural stone veneer, retaining walls, fireplaces, walkways, and landscapes.

The Problem

Pyle Bros. was stuck.

They had been trying to get their website updated for over a year and a half. Unfortunately, their web vendor wasn’t responsive. To make matters worse, that vendor had registered and owned their domain, which essentially meant they couldn’t move elsewhere and start from scratch without losing the website address printed on every business document and painted on every work truck.

The Job

Pyle Bros. needed a new website, and a new vendor they could rely on, without incurring the business cost of changing domain names.

The Solution

CCG Labs worked two processes in parallel: getting ownership of the customer’s domain, and building a new website so it was ready if and when the client got ownership and access to their domain registration settings.

Obtaining Ownership of the Domain (The Right Way)

Business owners need to register and own their domain. This situation prompted me to write a whole darned blog post explaining why. To make a long story short: if you let your web vendor register your domain under their name, in an account they own, you had better hope they stay in business at least as long as you do, because you’re married to them.

I exhausted every path I could find:

1. Doing a WHOIS to get the registration information.
2. When WHOIS showed that the ownership info was masked, I contacted the registrar to get a message to the owner. That failed, several times, over several months.
3. I hired a domain broker to attempt to purchase the domain name back from the owner. That failed.
4. I contacted the client’s previous web vendor directly, several times over several months. No response.
5. I found their personal cell number and decided the situation was dire enough to bother them. No response.

After weeks of failed attempts, I decided to try calling one last time. And they picked up.

Once we made contact, their former vendor was happy to make the changes required to transfer the domain (it takes five minutes). I had the client create their own domain registrar account and we transferred the domain into it.

The client now owns their domain registration, as they always should have.

The Website

Pyle Bros.’ needs weren’t huge:

1. So long as their vendor is responsive, they didn’t want to update the website themselves.
2. They needed it optimized to get leads within a broad geographic region.
3. They needed content related to services they no longer offer scrubbed.
4. They needed content related to the previous generation of owners changed, as they had retired.
5. They needed project-related content and photography updated.

A client that doesn’t want to update their own site, and that doesn’t have needs that require a “backend,” is a perfect candidate for what is called a “static site.” A static site is just a site built on the basic, original building blocks of the web: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. They can live anywhere, they load fast, they’re cheap to host, and they’re secure because there is no infrastructure to protect. They don’t require regular maintenance because there’s no infrastructure to support.

So we built a static site using Astro and hosted it on AWS’s content delivery network. The site is gorgeous on any device, loads incredibly fast, scores incredibly well on metrics important to search engine optimization, and has content optimized for both search and AI.

That last one is new: any site we ship going forward comes with an agents.md file that tells services like ChatGPT about the business, what services it offers, and how to get in touch. Since so many people are using ChatGPT to answer the questions they used to post to Google, this is getting critical.