By Dakota Hagler, web designer at HaglerDesigns (Longview, TX) Key takeaways The $2.95/month web host deal is real — for exactly the length of your first term. Then it triples or quadruples. Renewal shock is by design. The industry knows how many people will not switch hosts, and prices the “captive year” accordingly. Add-ons are…
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By Dakota Hagler, web designer at HaglerDesigns (Longview, TX) Key takeaways Homepage videos can help — but only when the video says something the photos can’t. They can also destroy your site’s performance: autoplay video is one of the top killers of Core Web Vitals. Use video for storytelling (a walkthrough of the shop, a…
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By Dakota Hagler, web designer at HaglerDesigns (Longview, TX) Key takeaways An AI-written website has a smell. Once you know the smell, you cannot un-smell it. Customers notice too, even the ones who cannot articulate it — they call it “something felt off.” Five tells give away most AI copy: the em-dash spam, the “delve”…
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By Dakota Hagler, web designer at HaglerDesigns (Longview, TX) Key takeaways In Texas, most small business websites do not need a cookie banner. Texas privacy law does not require one. You may still need one if you sell to Californians, Europeans, or you run Meta Pixel and Google Ads without Consent Mode. The Texas Data…
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By Dakota Hagler, web designer at HaglerDesigns (Longview, TX) Key takeaways The average small business WordPress site I audit has 22–35 active plugins. That is 3–4x what the site actually needs. Every plugin is code that runs. Runs slowly, on someone else’s schedule, with someone else’s security discipline. Plugins are the #1 cause of slow…
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