Welcome to the new site!
Auntie Snorkel is one of Maui’s busy snorkel and beach gear rental and activity businesses. The website is not a brochure. It’s the storefront. It takes the bookings, captures the orders, and runs a real volume of revenue, milions of dollars a year across tens of thousands of orders and bookings. When the website has a bad day, the business has a bad day.
We were already running Auntie Snorkel’s advertising when the deeper problem surfaced. The agency who had built and hosted their website controlled almost everything the business depended on, and the relationship had gone sideways.
They held the hosting account, in their name, not the company's. They controlled the domain’s settings. They controlled the email system that sent every order confirmation. Most of the paid software running the store was licensed and billed under their accounts, not the owner’s.
Then it got worse. During a routine maintenance task the team got locked out of their own admin dashboard. When the owner asked the agency to help, they did, but then quietly tightened their grip instead of loosening it. They restricted the owner’s access, blocked the people working on the site, and removed the safeguards put in place, all while the staff were trying to process customer orders. This was no longer a slow contractor. It was an uncooperative one in control of a business they did not own.
We couldn’t get server or database access to the old site. By design, that was the whole problem. So instead of a normal migration, we rebuilt the entire website from the outside, from a complete inventory we captured using various tools and software. Then we did the hard part carefully, in stages:
We moved the domain’s control onto an account the business owns, and in the process found and removed an access grant the developer still had. His control was severed weeks before the actual move, with zero disruption to the live site.
We tested every order, booking, form, and payment path on a private copy before anything went live.
The email that sends customer confirmations, the software licenses, the analytics, all moved onto accounts in the owner’s name.
We kept the old site intact as a safety net the entire time. When we were done, every order, booking, customer record, and dollar of search ranking had carried over. Nothing was lost.
