Websites for Michigan Small Businesses, by the Gleaner

Michigan runs on small businesses, and travelers find most of them before they ever park. According to Travel Michigan's report on the 2024 season, 131.2 million visitors traveled to Michigan that year and spent $30.7 billion in destinations across the state, and the tourism industry's total economic impact reached $54.8 billion. Much of that money changes hands at counters, docks and front desks rather than in big-box aisles, because the U.S. Small Business Administration's 2024 Michigan profile counts 945,788 small businesses in the state, 99.6 percent of all Michigan businesses, employing 1.8 million people. Across more than two hundred guides, the Gleaner has written about a great many of them, from the bakery on the corner to the outfitter at the river landing, and again and again we have gone looking for one of those businesses online only to find a stale listing, a dead link or nothing at all. That gap is the reason for this guide, and for a new service. Starting now, The Great Lakes Gleaner will build your Michigan business a website from your own photos and colors, host it for $50 a year, and hand you admin access once it is finished.

Where Travelers Actually Look

The modern road trip is planned in the palm of a hand. The Pew Research Center's mobile fact sheet reports that about nine in ten American adults, 91 percent, now own a smartphone, and the family standing in a parking lot in Petoskey wondering where to eat is almost certainly holding one. Search engines have followed them there, and Google's documentation on mobile-first indexing states plainly that Google uses the mobile version of a site's content, crawled with a smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking. A website that pinches, scrolls sideways or hides its phone number behind a fiddly menu is therefore not merely awkward; it is the version of your business that Google weighs. The same logic applies to the customers who never call at all, because they decide from a single glance at a small screen whether your hours, your prices and your photographs feel trustworthy. Every site the Gleaner builds is designed for that phone first and the desktop second.

A free listing on a map is a fine start, but it is not the same thing as a home of your own. Google's guidelines for representing a business ask owners to provide a website that represents their individual business location, alongside an accurate name, address and customer-facing hours, so the listing itself is designed to point visitors toward a site you control. The SBA's guide to marketing and sales makes the same point from the other direction, advising that if you want an online presence for your business, you should start by registering a domain name, which it calls a good way to protect your brand presence online. A website is the one place where your story, your services, your seasonal hours and your best photographs can sit together without a platform rearranging them. It is also where a customer can ask you for a quote at eleven o'clock at night, long after the shop lights have gone out. That last point matters more than almost anything else, and it is where this offer differs from a simple web page.

What the Gleaner Builds

The process begins with your own material. You send at least three photographs and choose at least two colors, and we design the site around them, writing about your business in the same plainspoken way we write about Michigan's towns, from Frankenmuth's Bavarian main street to Marshall's historic downtown. Photographs carry more weight than most owners expect, and Google's image guidance for site owners notes that high-quality photos appeal to users more than blurry, unclear images, and that images belong near the text they illustrate. We also write a descriptive text alternative for every picture and keep words readable against your chosen colors, because the Justice Department's guidance on web accessibility names missing alt text and poor color contrast among the common barriers on the websites of businesses open to the public. Hosting costs $50 a year and renews annually until you cancel, and that price includes your web address: we choose and buy an affordable domain suited to your business on your behalf, unless you would rather set up the DNS for a domain you already own or transfer that domain to us. When your site is finished, you receive admin access to it. The finished site is yours to keep current, not something you have to ask permission to change.

Before anything goes live, we talk. Expect a phone call from (989) 858-6742 to walk through the design, the pages you want and any changes you would like, and if you would rather not take a call, a checkbox on the order form tells us to email you instead. Your photographs reach our inbox exactly as you sent them, which is why the form accepts up to 25 MB of images in total: Gmail's help center sets 25 MB as the attachment limit for personal accounts, and anything larger would arrive as a Drive link rather than as a file. That ceiling still leaves room for a generous handful of sharp phone photos, and we would far rather have several real pictures of your work than one polished stock image of someone else's. Payment happens at checkout through Stripe, which is certified to PCI Service Provider Level 1, described by Stripe as the most stringent level of certification available in the payments industry. Stripe handles the card details, so they never pass through our hands.

A Lead Inbox, and a Year of Trades Chaser Free

A contact form is only as good as what happens after someone presses send. Every site we build includes a quote and contact form wired into Trades Chaser, the invoicing app we run alongside the Gleaner, so each request lands in a leads inbox with an email alert instead of vanishing into a mailbox nobody checks in July. Your order includes a full year of the Trades Chaser Base plan at no charge, a plan that normally costs $421.20 a year and covers customers, quotes, invoices, automatic payment reminders, expenses and job costing. Good books are more than a convenience, too, since the IRS guidance on recordkeeping notes that good records help you monitor the progress of your business and prepare your financial statements, and they support what you report on your tax return. Turning a request into a quote, and a quote into an invoice that reminds the customer on its own, closes the loop that a stand-alone website leaves open. After the first year you can keep going on any Trades Chaser plan, including the free one.

The same offer is available directly from Trades Chaser at tradechaser.online/sites, and both order forms feed the same workshop, so it makes no difference which door you walk through. Orders placed through the Gleaner simply carry Great Lakes Gleaner branding in the footer of the finished site. Billing for the Gleaner's websites runs through the Trades Chaser account, which is why your receipt, issued through Stripe, and any renewal notices will carry that name. For businesses that run on the seasons, the arrangement is gentle: one charge a year keeps the site online through the quiet months, when an up-to-date page with your winter hours or your opening date in May does a great deal of work on your behalf. And because the lead inbox lives inside an invoicing tool rather than a separate service, the customer who found you in March can be quoted, scheduled and billed from the same place by June.

Phone Calls, Texts and Your Say in Both

Nobody likes an unexpected call, and we would rather earn a conversation than impose one. The National Do Not Call Registry exists because unwanted calls became such a nuisance, and federal law has restricted telemarketing since the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, which limits telephone solicitations and the use of automated telephone equipment. Our call is different in kind, because it is a single conversation about a website you have just ordered, placed from (989) 858-6742 by a person rather than a machine. Still, the choice is yours: tick the box marked "Please don't call me" and every exchange about your design will happen by email instead. Nothing about the price, the site or the free year of Trades Chaser changes if you opt out.

Text messages are strictly opt-in. A second checkbox lets you ask for project updates by text at the number you give us, and it stays unticked unless you tick it yourself, because agreeing to texts is never a condition of buying. If you do opt in, message frequency varies, message and data rates may apply, and replying STOP ends the texts at any time. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act's reach into text messaging is one reason we keep consent explicit and record the exact wording you agreed to, and it is simple good manners besides. The Federal Trade Commission's advice on spam texts suggests forwarding unwanted messages to 7726 (SPAM) so carriers can spot and block similar ones, and we would much prefer that our texts never come anywhere near that category. A short note about your homepage draft should feel like a message from a neighbor, not an advertisement.

How to Get Started

Ordering takes a few minutes on the Websites by the Gleaner order page. You will be asked for your company name, the trade or business you are in, your legal name, an email address, a phone number and your business address, followed by a description of the site you would like and a choice about your web address: let us pick and buy one for you, or bring your own by doing the DNS yourself or transferring it. Then comes the enjoyable part, choosing at least two colors and uploading at least three photographs, up to the 25 MB total that Gmail's attachment limit allows. When you continue, you pay $50 for the first year through Stripe's secure checkout, and our inbox receives your order with every photo attached. From there, the next voice you hear will be ours, calling from (989) 858-6742, unless you asked for email instead.

If you are just starting out, there is more help close to home. The Michigan Small Business Development Center offers free support with small business consulting, tools and resources, including one-on-one coaching at every stage of a business, and it pairs naturally with a new website and a tidy set of books. The SBA's Michigan profile is a reminder that you are in good company, since small businesses employ 47.4 percent of Michigan's workers. Whether you look after cottages around Lewiston's lakes, press cider at a roadside mill or repair boats along the Lake Michigan shore, a clear website is the most patient salesperson you will ever hire. We started this service because we keep meeting businesses worth the detour, and we would like travelers to be able to find yours.