We rebuilt our website around one job: managed IT
sentinelgrid.us now does one thing: managed IT for small businesses in Orlando, Palm Beach and western NC. What we cut, what we kept, and why.
As of today, sentinelgrid.us is about one thing: managed IT for small and medium businesses. The product pages are gone and each product now lives on its own site. The homepage used to be a directory. Now it answers the four questions people actually ask before they email an IT company: what you do, what it costs, whether you come to them, and what happens when they send a ticket.
Why we cut it down
The old site grew one page at a time. A car diagnostics tool here, a Discord verification service there, a games studio, a camera project. Every one of those is real work and we're still building them. But someone looking for IT support for a twelve-person office in Lake Mary had to scroll past all of it to find the part meant for them, and some of them probably didn't bother.
Search engines get confused the same way. A site that covers six unrelated things doesn't rank well for any of them. A site that covers one thing, with a page for every town it serves, has a much better chance.
So the products moved out. AutoDX is at getautodx.com, VerifyBlox is at its own domain, and Studios has its own subdomain. Every old URL redirects permanently to its new home, so nothing that linked to us breaks.
What the homepage shows now
The first thing on every page is a thin strip with the ticket address (makeaticket@sentinelgrid.us), the on-site hours (Monday to Friday, 3pm to 8pm Eastern) and a link to the client portal. If you're already a client, that strip is probably all you need.
Under it, the homepage goes through the rest in the order most people ask:
- How a ticket runs. You email us or open the portal, a person on our team reads it, we fix it remotely by default, we come on site when hardware needs hands, and what broke goes into your documentation. Outages get a best-effort response within two hours, any hour.
- What we do. A numbered list of six services: help desk, remote support, monitoring, managed and encrypted computers, people and access, and business email on your own domain. Every one of them is running today.
- What it costs. All four plans are on the homepage with their prices, not behind a "contact us for a quote" button. Watch is $149 a month, Support is $45 per user, Manage is $79 per user, and Operate is $129 per user. The pricing post explains how we got to those numbers.
- Where we work. Our headquarters in downtown Orlando, our location in the Sanford area of Seminole County, and service hubs in Jupiter (covering Palm Beach County) and Laurel Park, North Carolina (covering Hendersonville to Asheville).
- How to start. A free audit, then up to four weeks of onboarding, then you send tickets. That's all of it.
The parts we kept on purpose
Some things survived the redesign because they're the reason anyone should trust a small IT company they've never heard of.
The build status page. The roadmap still lists what's running, what's being built and what's only planned. The homepage links to it straight from the services list. If a service isn't built yet, we say so before you buy it, not after.
Published terms. The contract is readable, every term has a version number and a change note, and the agreements are published as PDFs. The about page also names the company you'd be contracting with, which is Gridhouse LLC.
One page per town. Each city, town and village we cover has its own page under where we work, written for that place rather than a template with the name swapped. If you search for managed IT in Orlando, Sanford or Jupiter, that page is the one we want you to land on.
The blog. Posts about running IT for small offices stay. Posts that were really about a product went to that product's site or were retired. This post is the first one written since the change.
What a good IT company website should tell you
If you're comparing IT providers, ours or anyone's, these are worth checking before the first call:
- A price. Not an exact quote, but a published rate you can do the arithmetic on. If every number is "it depends," you'll find out what it depends on during the sales pitch.
- Hours, in writing. When can you send a ticket, when will a person read it, and when will someone actually come to your office? Those are three separate answers.
- What isn't built yet. Every provider has gaps. The ones who list theirs are easier to trust on everything else.
- How you leave. Notice period, exit fees, and whether your documentation and passwords go with you. Ours is month to month, thirty days' notice, no exit fee, and your documentation leaves with you.
- Who you're actually signing with. A legal entity and an address, not just a logo.
A site that answers all five isn't proof the company is good, but a site that dodges them tells you something too.
Same company, smaller site
None of the work changed. The same team answers the same tickets, and the plans and prices are the same as they were yesterday. The site just stopped making you hunt for them.
If your office has no one looking after its computers, start with the free audit. You get a written risk list in the first week, and it's yours whether you sign up or not. For the longer case on whether a small business needs managed IT at all, read what managed IT actually means for a small business.