Fourteen years and counting
The Mill has been a Brooks New Media client since 2011. They make handcrafted wood pipes, bowls, and smoker accessories out of Corning, NY, and they have been in production for over fifty years. But the relationship goes back further than that. Lorraine Kelly, who runs The Mill, is a dear family friend. We go back to Corning in the mid-nineties. When she needed someone to take her business online, it was a natural fit.
That first project was our first full-stack engagement: website, e-commerce, hosting, and ongoing maintenance. A lot has changed since then. The web has gone through three or four cycles of what “modern” means. Hosting platforms have come and gone. Servers age out. Roughly every ten years, it is time for a new one. This was the second server migration we have done together, and hopefully not the last.
A fresh start with Creagent Marketing
Earlier this year, The Mill brought in Sean and his team at Creagent Marketing to rebuild the site from scratch. Creagent is a full-service digital marketing agency that specializes in travel, nonprofit, tourism, and service industries. They brought the full package: new design, new product photography, new brand direction, and ongoing marketing to drive traffic after launch. Erin Panosian, a photographer and designer working with Creagent, shot all the product images. Sean rebuilt the store layout, and together they gave the whole site a look that finally matches the quality of what Lorraine makes.
It is great to see Lorraine with a dedicated team behind her. Creagent handles the design, the photography, the outreach, and the traffic. Brooks New Media handles the server, the hosting, and the long-term maintenance. For me, this is a side project, but it is one I have been doing for fourteen years and I take it seriously. Having a full-service agency like Creagent in the mix means Lorraine gets more attention and better results than either of us could deliver alone.
Working with Sean on this project was genuinely fun. He is sharp, communicates well, and knows his stuff. When we had questions about the design or store setup, he had answers. When he needed the server environment configured a certain way, we made it happen. The whole thing was smooth. That does not happen by accident. Good people to work with.
Our job was the infrastructure. Sean built the house. We poured the foundation and ran the plumbing.
What the migration actually involved
The previous site lived on our old Media Temple server. It worked fine for years, but the platform had aged out. Performance ceilings, outdated server software, and limited room to grow. Sean built the new version on his own staging environment, and when it was ready, we moved his staging site over to our new Hetzner VPS for final testing and launch.
That meant:
- Standing up a clean WordPress environment with PHP 8.3 and MariaDB
- Staging the full site on our server while the old one stayed live
- Testing WooCommerce, PayPal checkout, and every product page before flipping the switch
- Coordinating the DNS cutover so there was zero downtime for customers
The result: faster page loads, tighter security, and a server we fully control. When something needs attention at 10 PM on a Tuesday, we do not submit a support ticket. We log in and fix it.
Builders and hosts are not competitors
There is a misconception in the small business web world that you hire one person or one company to do everything. Design, content, hosting, SEO, maintenance, all from a single provider.
Sometimes that works. We do it for several of our clients. But it is not the only model, and it is not always the best one.
Sean at Creagent Marketing is a talented builder. He understands design, branding, product photography, and how to structure a WooCommerce store that makes sense for the business. He also brings the marketing chops to drive traffic after launch, which is where a lot of site rebuilds fall short. We are good at the infrastructure side: servers, performance, security, uptime, and long-term maintenance.
When a builder and a host trust each other, the client gets the best of both. The builder focuses on what the customer sees. The host focuses on what keeps it running. Nobody is stretched thin trying to do everything.
What The Mill has now
After the migration, we ran a full technical audit. The results speak for themselves:
- Performance: A (100/100)
- Security: A (100/100)
- Technical SEO: A (100/100)
- Overall SEO: B (85/100)
There is still work to do on content freshness and local SEO, and we are chipping away at that. But the foundation is solid. The site is fast, secure, and running on infrastructure we manage directly.
More importantly, Lorraine at The Mill has two people she can call. Sean for the design, the photography, and the marketing. Us for everything underneath. That is a good setup for a small business.
The takeaway for other builders
If you are a web designer or a marketing professional who builds sites for clients, you do not have to be the hosting expert too. And you should not have to be.
Find someone who handles the server side well and build a working relationship with them. Your clients get better results. You get to focus on what you are best at. And when something breaks at the infrastructure level, it is not your problem to debug alone.
We work with builders like Sean regularly. If that sounds like a model that would work for you, get in touch.
The takeaway for small businesses
If you already have someone who built your website, that is great. But ask yourself: who is managing the server it runs on? Who is monitoring uptime? Who applies security patches? Who do you call at 10 PM when the site goes down?
If the answer to any of those questions is “I do not know,” you might need a hosting partner.