The situation
Arlin runs a window tint shop in New Bern, North Carolina. Ceramic IR and standard films, hand installed, backed by a limited lifetime warranty — the sort of trade where the work is genuinely good and the difficulty is proving that to someone who has only ever bought tint on price.
The shop was on Wix. That is not an insult; Wix is a reasonable way to get online quickly and plenty of businesses should stay there. But it stops being the right answer at a specific point, and this business had passed it.
When a page builder stops being enough
Three signs, all of which applied here:
- You want something the builder does not do, and every workaround is an app subscription that half-fits.
- You are paying monthly forever for something you will never own, and the bill only goes up.
- The site cannot show what makes you better. A tint shop's whole argument is film quality, heat rejection and warranty. That needs structure, not a stack of text boxes.
What we built
A custom site the business owns outright, with the parts a tint shop actually needs rather than the parts a template offers.
Before
- Wix, with a monthly bill
- Locked to the platform's structure
- Enquiries handled through the builder
- No admin view of its own
- Film comparison hard to present clearly
After
- A custom site on its own domain
- Booking and enquiry flow built for the trade
- An in-house contact form, delivering straight to the shop's inbox
- A private admin area, with the time each enquiry arrived
- Films laid out side by side, with the warranty stated plainly
The films, presented as a decision
The site sets the two options against each other properly — the ceramic IR film for maximum heat rejection, and the standard film for value — with the honest trade-off between them, the UV numbers, the note that neither interferes with phone signal, and the limited lifetime warranty that covers both. A customer arrives at the shop having already made most of the decision, which is a better conversation for everyone.
Enquiries the shop controls
The contact form is ours end to end: submitted without a page reload, delivered by the shop's own Google Workspace mail, and recorded in a private admin area with the time it came in. No third-party form service, no per-submission plan, nothing that can start charging or disappear.
The unglamorous test of a small-business site: when an enquiry comes in at 8pm on a Saturday, does the owner find out? Most of the effort here went into that, not into animation.
Six hundred miles
New Bern is roughly six hundred miles from Waverly, Tennessee. The whole project — design, build, migration, going live on the real domain — ran remotely.
That is worth saying plainly, because the usual worry about hiring a small studio out of state is that you will end up chasing someone by email for six weeks. The thing that actually prevents it is not being local. It is being one person: there is no account manager between you and the person building the site, so nothing gets lost in the handoff, because there is no handoff.
Thinking about leaving Wix or Squarespace?
The migration itself is a normal, well-worn job — see website redesign and migration. Two things worth knowing before you start:
- Keep what works. A rebuild is not a reason to throw away copy, photos or a page structure that has been earning its keep. The point is to remove the ceiling, not to start again for its own sake.
- Sort out the domain first. The most common way these go wrong is discovering, late, that nobody at the business can actually get into the domain registrar.
Costs are published on the pricing guide rather than quoted on request.