A web designer for St. Clair Shores, MI

St. Clair Shores sits on the western side of Lake St. Clair, about 14 miles northeast of downtown Detroit. I’m a few miles up the same shoreline in Harrison Township, a little over 20 minutes from the middle of the city by car.

I build for this lake on my own account, too. Experience Boat Town is a Lake St. Clair boating guide I built from scratch and launched in August 2026: marinas, launches, restaurants and events, each on its own page.

I’m one person, so you deal with me from the first call to launch. The work runs by phone, video call and email.

The Nautical Mile is the stretch of Jefferson Avenue between 9 Mile and 10 Mile Roads. It’s lined with restaurants, shops, boat dealers, and both private and city marinas, and most of the city’s 14 miles of canals are along it. The 28-story Shore Club Sky Tower at the foot of 9 Mile, the one locals call the 9 Mile Tower, is the landmark everyone can find.

A business there has two kinds of customer. One drives in on Jefferson. The other is already on the lake and decides from a phone, sometimes from the deck of a boat. A Nautical Mile website should answer both on the first screen:

• Where you are relative to 9 Mile, 10 Mile and the tower, with parking for people who drive
• Whether boaters can tie up, and where
• Today’s hours, which you can change yourself the day they change
• A menu, service list or boat inventory that reads well on a phone held in one hand

A boat dealer needs inventory pages that are quick to update. A restaurant two doors down needs its menu and a reservation button one tap from the top.

Most of the city isn’t on the lake. The 2020 census counted 58,874 people, with a median age of 44.8 and 21% of residents 65 or older. If you sell to homeowners, that’s your customer: settled, careful, and more likely to call than fill in a form.

So I put your phone number at the top of every page, use type large enough to read without zooming, and keep calling you to one tap.

The city borders Roseville and Eastpointe to the west, and Harper Woods, Grosse Pointe Woods and Grosse Pointe Shores to the south in Wayne County, with I-94 along its western edge. If you’re a contractor or a service business, your jobs cross those lines every week. Your site should name the towns you really work in, and skip the ones you’ve only driven through.

There’s one more audience worth knowing about. St. Clair Shores has long been a youth hockey town, and the civic center has two indoor rinks. Sports shops, trainers and restaurants near the arena have a crowd of hockey parents searching on their phones between games.

Should my website say St. Clair Shores or Lake St. Clair?

Both, each in its place. People search “St. Clair Shores” for the city and “Lake St. Clair” for the water, and those are different searches. There’s also the separate city of St. Clair up in St. Clair County, so a vague page can end up competing for the wrong place entirely.

Your homepage, page titles and Google Business Profile use your real St. Clair Shores address, written exactly the same way everywhere, down to “St.” versus “Saint”. That’s how Google reads every mention as one business. If your business depends on the lake, a page about what you offer on Lake St. Clair, like a restaurant’s dock or a dealer’s boat service, picks up the second kind of search without muddying the first.

How should a lakefront business keep its website useful in the off-season?

A site that still shows summer hours and a July event in January tells people you’ve closed, or that nobody’s minding the store.

For the cold months, the homepage should lead with what’s true now. For a marina or dealer, that’s storage, winterizing and service. For a restaurant, it’s winter hours, private events and gift cards.

I build the seasonal parts so you can change them yourself, in a few clicks, without calling me. Your Google Business Profile hours need the same change on the same day, because Maps shows those hours first and people believe them.

Will a new website get me into Google Maps around the Nautical Mile?

It helps, but the profile does most of the work. Google Maps rankings come mainly from your Google Business Profile: the right categories, an accurate address and hours, real reviews, and how close you are to the person searching. The website backs that up. It confirms your name, address and phone number match, and gives Google a page for each service it can connect to the profile.

On a strip as dense as the Nautical Mile, a restaurant under the wrong main category loses to a neighbor that got it right. My Google Business Profile optimization is $400 one-time, and I can set it up alongside the new site so the two agree from day one.