From Bikes to Websites: Why I Started Web by Wyatt

In June of 2011, I founded Wyatt Bicycles. I was a junior at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse at the time. The business started simple. I was importing single speed bikes from China and selling them as an affordable, low maintenance alternative for riders who were tired of dealing with finicky derailleurs.

In 2017, I followed my dream of bringing manufacturing in-house and taught myself the entire aluminum frame manufacturing process from the ground up. From there, Wyatt Bicycles became a true American made brand, designing and manufacturing bikes right here in Wisconsin and selling them direct to customers across the country. I brought on silent partners along the way, but the day to day work of running and growing the business was entirely on me.

For over a decade, the Wyatt Bicycles website wasn’t just a marketing tool. It was the entire business and customer experience. Every order, every customer relationship, every dollar of revenue ran through that site. If the website wasn’t working, nothing was working.

I didn’t set out to become a web designer or an SEO specialist. I became one out of necessity. I didn’t have a budget for an agency. If something needed to be fixed, optimized, or rebuilt, I had to figure it out myself.

Before I get into websites, I want to tell you about the $6,000 bicycle heat treatment oven that should have cost well over $100,000. It explains a lot about how I approach problems.

When I started manufacturing in-house, Wyatt Bicycles needed a process called solution heat treatment to bring our aluminum frames to the right strength after welding a frame. For a while, we outsourced it. The quality was inconsistent, the lead times were long, and the cost was high. So I started looking at buying an in-house oven.

A new solution heat treat oven, fully installed, runs well over $100,000 with the cost to install it.

I didn’t have the funds to purchase an oven. So instead, I designed and built one myself using parts from the local hardware store and McMaster-Carr. The total cost came in under $6,000 and it worked! It cut the production costs and brought lead times down significantly. Instead of waiting weeks for a batch of frames to get done, I was able to get a batch done in a day.

That’s how I think. Whether the problem is a manufacturing bottleneck or a website that isn’t generating sales for your business, I want to understand it from the inside out and find the solution that actually works, not just the one with the biggest price tag.

For years, the Wyatt Bicycles website looked the part. People who landed on it converted reasonably well due to the custom bike configurator. The problem was that not enough people were landing on it in the first place.

The site wasn’t ranking well. Search traffic was a trickle. And for a business where the website was the only sales channel, that was a real problem hiding behind a nice looking homepage.

A website that looks great and does nothing is one of the most common problems I see now. A site checked the box, but it’s not the reason the phone isn’t ringing. So nobody questions it. Meanwhile a competitor with a less polished site shows up first in Google and gets the call.

In 2021, I stopped tweaking the design and started focusing on the parts of a website that actually drive visibility. This is the work I now offer as a dedicated SEO service. I rebuilt the technical structure of the site from the ground up. I rewrote meta titles and descriptions across every page. Then I went category by category, such as “Fat Bikes”, building out content around the specific questions our customers were actually asking, and internally linking it all back to the right category pages.

It wasn’t fast, and it wasn’t simple. But it worked. Wyatt Bicycles climbed onto the first page and eventually to the top spot for “American made bicycles and American-made fat bikes.” We held that ranking without spending a dollar on ads.

That result didn’t come from luck or a magic plugin. It came from understanding how the whole system works together. Strategy, structure, content, and intent. Good design is part of it, but design alone doesn’t get you found. The two have to work together.

I launched Web by Wyatt in February of 2017, the same year I brought bike manufacturing in-house. For nearly a decade I did both. I’d spend my days in the shop and my evenings helping other business owners get their websites to actually do something.

It was a lot. But it confirmed something important. The problems I’d solved for Wyatt Bicycles weren’t unique to the bike industry. E-commerce brands, manufacturers, machine shops, local service business, realtors, and small business were all running into the same wall. A website that looked fine on the surface but wasn’t generating calls, leads, or sales. An owner who’d been told by some agency that they needed to spend more on ads. A complete disconnect between the business and its online presence.

I’ve sat across the table from plenty of agencies and pixel pushers who use fancy terminology to justify big invoices without delivering real results. I know what it looks and feels like, and that experience is a big part of why I started Web by Wyatt.

After 15 years of building Wyatt Bicycles, I made the call to step away. It was bittersweet. I poured a lot into that business and I’ll miss the amazing customers and the craft of manufacturing great bikes. What I won’t miss is the ups and downs of the bike industry and the weight of running every side of a manufacturing business on my own.

Web by Wyatt is now my full-time focus, working with local service businesses, contractors, trades, manufacturers, and e-commerce brands throughout the US.

Here’s the thing most agencies or DIY website builders won’t tell you. A good looking website that nobody finds is worth nothing. A website that ranks but doesn’t convert is almost as bad. The two problems are connected, and solving them requires someone who understands both sides.

That’s the entire reason I do web design and SEO together. Design without strategy is decoration. Strategy without good design loses people the second they land on the page. You need both, working as one system.

I built a business where the website was the only sales channel. I had a site that looked great and barely drove traffic, until I learned how to fix it. I got to #1 for a competitive national keyword without a single paid ad. And I’ve spent the better part of a decade helping other business owners do the same. I broke the full story down in the Wyatt Bicycles case study.

That’s not a credential I earned in a classroom. It’s operator experience. And it’s the difference between someone who knows the theory and someone who’s actually lived the outcome.