A Professional Website for Your Business

ADA: Your Website Is a Legal Exposure Before It Is a Marketing Asset

Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act bans discrimination in "places of public accommodation", and the Department of Justice along with most federal courts read business websites into that definition. The consequence is a genuine litigation industry: thousands of ADA website lawsuits are filed in federal court every year — New York, Florida and California lead the docket — on top of an uncounted stream of pre-suit demand letters. Serial plaintiffs deliberately pick small and mid-sized businesses because most owners settle fast rather than fund a federal defense.

Once attorney fees, remediation work and the plaintiff’s costs stack up, settlements routinely land in the five figures — far more than building the site accessibly would have cost in the first place. There is no official federal certification, but WCAG 2.1 AA is the de facto standard that courts and DOJ consent decrees reference. Treating accessibility as a launch requirement rather than a retrofit is the cheapest legal insurance a US website owner can buy.

The Practical WCAG 2.1 AA Checklist We Build Against

Accessibility is not a plugin or an overlay widget — courts have seen through those. It is a set of concrete engineering decisions made during design and build:

• Full keyboard operability: every menu, modal and form works without a mouse
• Visible focus states so keyboard users always know where they are
• Descriptive alt text on meaningful images; empty alt on decorative ones
• Text contrast of at least 4.5:1 against its background
• Form fields with programmatic labels and error messages announced to screen readers
• Captions and transcripts for video and audio content
• A logical heading hierarchy and semantic HTML landmarks
• An accessibility statement page with a working contact channel

Before launch we test with real screen readers (VoiceOver, NVDA) alongside automated scans, and we re-check after every major content change — accessibility decays as sites grow.

Do You Need an LLC Before the Site Goes Live?

Legally, no. There is no US requirement to form an LLC or corporation before publishing a website; you can operate as a sole proprietor from day one. That said, most of our clients form a Delaware or Wyoming LLC early, so the domain, hosting contracts and the Stripe account sit under the company rather than a personal name — a separation that starts to matter the moment the site takes payments, bookings or signed engagements.

If you incorporate later, the switch is undramatic: we update the legal pages, the entity name in the privacy policy and terms, and the ownership records on the domain and payment accounts. Nothing about the build has to be redone — which means you can validate the market first and settle the corporate structure second.

Domain Strategy: .com First, USPTO Search Before You Commit

For American customers .com remains the default expectation — alternative endings read as improvised. Before registering anything we search the USPTO trademark records so your chosen name does not collide with a live mark in your class of goods or services. Rebranding after launch means a new domain, new signage, migrated ad accounts and abandoned review history: an expensive way to learn a name was already taken.

Alongside the domain we secure matching social handles where available and set up DNS, SSL and business email on your own domain. If a trademark filing is on your roadmap, we prepare the site so the way your name and logo appear can serve as specimen evidence in the application.

Google Business Profile: The Highest-Leverage Free Asset in US Local Search

For any business serving local customers, the map pack above the organic results decides more phone calls than page-one rankings do. We create or claim your Google Business Profile, complete verification, choose precise categories and load hours, photos, service menus and booking links.

Just as important is consistency: the name, address and phone number (NAP) on the profile must match your site footer and your listings across directories, because conflicting data suppresses local rankings. Reviews are wired into the routine — ask for them, respond to them, and let the profile feed leads straight into the site.

Multi-State Architecture: One Company, Many Local Markets

A US business rarely competes in "the United States" — it competes in Houston, in Miami, in Chicago. We build state- and city-level landing pages (Texas/Houston, Florida/Miami, Illinois/Chicago) with locally distinct content: local proof, local phone numbers, local FAQs — never duplicated boilerplate with a swapped city name, which Google filters out.

Each location gets its own LocalBusiness schema; service businesses without a storefront run as Service Area Business profiles. A hub-and-spoke internal linking structure ties the pages together, and the monthly Search Console report is broken out by state so you see what each market actually searches for.

CCPA/CPRA and the Growing State Privacy Patchwork

California’s CCPA, as amended by the CPRA, applies once you cross thresholds such as $25M+ in annual revenue, personal data of 100,000+ California consumers or households, or half of your revenue coming from selling data. In practice the definition of "selling or sharing" is broad enough that routine advertising and analytics pixels count — which is why many smaller businesses adopt the banner voluntarily.

We add the "Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information" link, honour the Global Privacy Control (GPC) browser signal that California actively enforces, and keep the policy current as more states switch on their own laws:

Core Web Vitals and a Nationwide CDN

Google’s Core Web Vitals — LCP for loading, INP for interactivity, CLS for visual stability — are a direct ranking input, and US visitors are unforgiving about slow pages. A customer in Los Angeles should not wait on a single server in Virginia: we ship every site behind a nationwide CDN so assets are served from an edge node near the visitor, coast to coast.

Under the hood that means WebP/AVIF images with strict size budgets, aggressive caching and JavaScript trimmed to what the page actually needs. After launch, field data from Search Console and the Chrome UX Report confirms the site stays in the green zone rather than merely passing a one-off lab test.

Three Sector Patterns: Miami, Austin, Houston

A Miami dental practice serves a bilingual market, so the site runs in English and Spanish, with online appointment booking and HIPAA-aware contact forms — no patient details flowing over plain email — plus consented before-and-after galleries. An Austin law firm needs practice-area pages, attorney bios with bar admissions and the advertising disclaimers state bar rules require, all feeding a structured intake form.

A Houston restaurant lives or dies on its Google Business Profile: the menu is published as accessible HTML rather than a scanned PDF (which neither Google nor screen readers handle well), reservations are one tap away, and photos are refreshed on a schedule. Three different businesses — three different builds on the same disciplined foundation.

Timeline, Pricing and What Ongoing Maintenance Covers

A standard corporate website goes live in two to three weeks. Pricing is quoted in USD, and deposits are handled through Stripe or PayPal. Before launch you receive the full ADA checklist, the CCPA banner configured for your actual data flows, and the Google Business Profile connected to the site.

The monthly plan is where a US site earns its keep: content updates, security patches, the cookie banner adjusted as new state privacy laws take effect, periodic accessibility re-checks and a Search Console report broken out by city and state. Zunapro builds and operates the site as one accountable partner — design, compliance, local SEO and performance in a single contract.