McGinnis Creative Group (MCG)
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How we build

Most agencies won't tell you how they decide.

We will. This is the reasoning behind the tools we use, the ones we refuse, and the one we used for years before the evidence changed our minds. If you are trying to work out whether we know what we are doing, read these rather than take our word for it.

Start here

Build What Makes You Different. Buy Everything Else.

We do not reinvent the wheel and we do not drop businesses into templates. Build the part that makes a client different, buy the rest from people who are better at it, and pick tools that let the work actually get done.

Read the method

The method applied

Five platforms, one argument.

Each of these looks like a piece about a platform. They are the same question asked four times: will this let us do the job properly for the person paying us? Read in any order.

Wix Isn’t Why Your Website Is Broken. Here’s Why It’s Still the Wrong Choice.

  • Wix ships CMS collections, dynamic pages, per-page SEO controls and custom JSON-LD schema. Most broken Wix sites are missing all of it, which makes it an operator problem rather than a platform one.
  • We don't build on Wix for two reasons. Wix's own documentation says a site “needs to be hosted and operated on Wix's servers” — so you cannot take it with you. And a template used as shipped looks like a template, which is a statement about your business you did not mean to make.
Read it →

Squarespace Locks the Door Behind You. Their Own Documentation Says So.

  • Squarespace produces the best-looking default output of any builder, and for a portfolio, restaurant or small shop it is a genuinely good choice.
  • Its collection types are a fixed list — blog, courses, events, portfolio, store, videos, galleries. You cannot define your own, so a business with thirty services or twelve locations has no native way to model that as data.
Read it →

WooCommerce Makes You Its System Administrator. Shopify Doesn’t.

  • The storefront gets looked at a few times a month. The admin gets opened every day the business is open — and that is where Shopify and WooCommerce are not close.
  • Woo's admin is the WordPress dashboard with commerce added to it, and its mobile app requires a Jetpack connection before you can check today's orders on your phone.
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GoDaddy’s Website Builder Can’t Do Local SEO. I Mean That Literally.

  • Almost nobody chooses this platform. You bought a domain, an upsell offered you a website with it, and that checkbox has been shaping your visibility ever since.
  • Independent 2024 testing found the builder gives you no schema markup, no control over heading tags, no editable robots.txt, no canonical tags, no noindex, no editable URL slugs, and no meta descriptions on blog posts at all — with no improvement in the three years prior.
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We Built on Elementor for Years. Here’s What Changed My Mind.

  • Most of the sites we run are built with Elementor. We chose it deliberately, it was the right call, and this is not a piece about regretting it.
  • What changed has a date on it: on 12 March 2024 Google replaced First Input Delay with Interaction to Next Paint as a Core Web Vital. Its three named causes of a poor score are long-running JavaScript, unnecessary JavaScript, and large rendering updates — which is a precise description of what every visual builder produces, by design rather than by neglect.
Read it →

Now ask us the hard version in person.

Everything above is the reasoning. Bring your actual site and your actual problem, and you will get the same straightness applied to it — including whether the answer is that you should not change anything.

Ben McGinnis, founder of MCG Ben McGinnis, founder — my name is on your account
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