Two checks on your own homepage cost nothing: open it on a phone and see whether the first screen says what you do, and whether it names the places you serve the way official lists, such as the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning's list of northeastern Illinois municipalities, spell them. In the Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN metro area, the Census Bureau's County Business Patterns put 146,092 of 248,519 employer establishments in the size group with fewer than 5 employees in 2023, and its Nonemployer Statistics counted 955,302 firms with no paid employees in 2024. For a business that size, the website is the storefront: it has to say what the business does and where, and the owner has to own it.
Book a free consultation →Most of a homepage check needs no hired help: the free website report card, your phone, and the official lists that spell the places you serve.
None of this takes a designer. It takes an honest read of what a stranger sees first.
The Census Bureau's County Business Patterns counted 248,519 employer establishments in the Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN metro area in 2023. Each establishment in that count is one location, and one company can account for several of them; only locations that had paid employees at any time during the year are counted. Of those 248,519, the Bureau put 146,092, or 58.8 percent, in the size group with fewer than 5 employees. That group is set by the mid-March pay period, and it also holds locations that reported no employees in that pay period but paid wages at some point in the year.
A second series, the Bureau's Nonemployer Statistics, counted 955,302 nonemployer businesses in the same metro area in 2024: firms with no paid employees, counted one per business income tax return. Among the sectors in that count are 123,787 firms in professional, scientific, and technical services, 95,172 in other services (except public administration) and 77,378 in construction.
Because the two series count different things in different years, they sit side by side here and are never added together. Read that way, they point the same way: a great many employer locations here have fewer than 5 employees, and a great many firms have none. When a business is that small, there is often nobody free to explain it to a stranger who looks it up. The website does that job.
When you call (407) 694-2055, the person who builds the site is the one who answers, with no account manager in between. That person works in Orlando, Florida, so a website for a business anywhere in the Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN metro area is designed, written and coded remotely; Kelly Webmasters and Marketers has neither an office nor staff in the Chicago metro.
Building from a distance has a cost, and it is worth stating plainly: photographs. Pictures of your crews and finished jobs cannot be taken from a desk in Orlando, so the build is planned around that or made from the photos you already have, and you are told which. Scheduling, ownership and the rest of a remote project are explained in working with Kelly WM remotely.
Several municipalities carry "Chicago" in their names and are not the City of Chicago. The municipal list of the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP), for its northeastern Illinois region, has Chicago, Chicago Heights, Chicago Ridge, North Chicago, South Chicago Heights and West Chicago as separate entries. The Cook County Department of Public Health lists Chicago Heights and South Chicago Heights under its South Region, and Chicago Ridge under its Southwest Region, of municipalities within suburban Cook County. Across the state line, the members of the Northwestern Indiana Regional Planning Commission (NIRPC) include the City of East Chicago and the Town of New Chicago.
The rule for a first screen follows directly: name the municipality you work from and the ones you work in, each by its own name. A business in Chicago Ridge whose homepage says only "Chicago" has described a different municipality.
Spelling is the other half, and the official sources do not always agree. In the City's own community-area data each area has a number and a name in capitals, such as 32 LOOP, while CMAP's list of the same areas prints The Loop. Pick one source's form for each name and use it the same way on every page, so the site never calls one place by two names.
A report card grade covers one page and nothing outside it; the tool's own page lists what it cannot see. The questions past the grade have their own Chicago pages. Chicago SEO works out which searches a business here can realistically compete for. How map results and a Business Profile behave across the metro gets its own treatment under local SEO in Chicago. Chicago AI search optimization asks whether AI answer engines can tell which places you serve.
The check also cannot tell you which language your customers would rather read, and the official facts on language describe government offices, not customers. The City of Chicago's Office of Inspector General, in its 2025 Language Access Compliance Report, says that, as determined by the Mayor's Office of Immigrant, Migrant, and Refugee Rights, "certain City departments are required to provide services in Spanish, Mandarin, Polish, Arabic, Hindi, and Urdu (in 2025)." Cook County's Offices Under the President adopted a language access policy in May 2021 that, under the demographics it cited, said the offices "will translate general information where all Cook County residents are the intended audience into English and Spanish." Both describe public offices in the City and in Cook County; neither speaks for the metro's other counties or for Indiana, and neither describes your customers.
If a second language ever goes on a site, Google's guidance is to use one language for the content and navigation of each page and to avoid side-by-side translations, because Google determines a page's language from its visible content. Whether your site needs one is yours to decide, and the people who actually call you are the evidence.
When a business has fewer than 5 employees, or none, its homepage does the work a front desk does in a larger one, and its first screen has to carry three things: what you do, the officially named places where you do it, and a phone number a visitor can tap.
How the page is built decides whether machines can read those words as well as people. Google's JavaScript guidance calls server-side or pre-rendering "still a great idea because it makes your website faster for users and crawlers, and not all bots can run JavaScript," which is why the service and the place names should already be in the HTML when the server sends it. Google also says intrusive dialogs and interstitials make it hard for search engines to understand a page, and recommends banners that take up only a small fraction of the screen instead. A first screen covered by a pop-up hides the very words it exists to show.
Ownership matters more, not less, when the business is small. If the domain, the site and the accounts are registered to a vendor, the vendor controls the storefront. Under Kelly WM's terms the client owns the site, the content and the accounts, and nothing is locked in: everything runs month to month, with no long-term contract.
Kelly WM's custom web design is hand-coded, with no page builder underneath. Most projects start with a free mockup of your homepage, made before any money changes hands or anything is signed. The writing of the code, the testing and the checks before launch are described on how we build.
A site with software behind it falls under web development. Calculators, job boards and portals are custom tools, priced on their own. Upkeep after launch is website maintenance, month to month like everything else.
Custom website builds from Kelly WM are $3,500 to $12,000+, one time. That is the published range, and it is not narrowed for Chicago or for any county around it. The longer answer on what drives a website's price is in how much a website costs, and the question of timing is covered in how long it takes to build a website.
For a figure on your own project, text your current site's address to (407) 694-2055, call the same number or fill in the quote form.
The site is written in code for your business, with no page builder underneath, so its pages are built around your services and the places you serve rather than poured into a template drawn for someone else. You own the site, the content and the accounts, registered to you. Nothing after launch is under a long-term contract: ongoing work goes month by month, and the site stays yours whether or not you keep working with Kelly WM.
Yes for quoting a job. Kelly WM publishes its custom tool prices. A calculator or estimator starts at $600. Most workhorse tools come to $1,500 to $4,000. A small store or online ordering starts at $3,500. Tool Care, the monthly upkeep, is $75 a month for each tool. A booking tool has no published price of its own, so, like any tool that list does not name, it would be scoped and quoted after a free consultation.
No. The Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN metro area has two counties named Lake: Lake County, Illinois, one of the seven northeastern Illinois counties in the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning's service area, and Lake County, Indiana, one of the three counties the Northwestern Indiana Regional Planning Commission serves. The Census Bureau keeps them apart as well, naming one metropolitan division "Lake County, IL" and another "Lake County-Porter County-Jasper County, IN". Write the state every time the county appears, on the first screen and on every page after it.
Nonemployer Statistics, the Census Bureau series that counts firms with no paid employees, places most of them by the owner's mailing address, which can differ from where the work is done. It counted 955,302 such businesses in the Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN metro area in 2024, one per business income tax return. The 2023 County Business Patterns count of 248,519 establishments leaves them out altogether, because it takes in only locations with paid employees. For a firm like that, the website is where the owner says where the business actually works.
No, a homepage does not have to. The City of Chicago's community-area dataset prints each name in capitals with an area number, as a data label: 76 OHARE, for one. The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning's list of the same 77 areas prints O’Hare. Both come from official bodies, and on a homepage the second form reads as an ordinary place name. Copy the name from the source you choose rather than retyping it, so details such as the apostrophe in O’Hare survive.
The figures on this page come from these public sources.
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Bring your current homepage and the list of places you serve to a free consultation with the person who would build the new site.
Book a free consultation → Or call/text directly: (407) 694-2055Tell us a little about the business and we will come back with an honest read: what we would fix first, what it costs, and whether you need us at all. Prefer to see work before you talk numbers? Get a free homepage mockup, built for your business, yours to keep either way.
Brandon reads every one of these himself. You will hear back shortly with an honest read on what we would do first, what it costs, and whether it is worth it for you.