Building a First Website for a Small Business

BUSINESS · GLOBAL

Building a First Website for a Small Business

What the site needs to do, pages, legal requirements and owning your domain

A small business website has one job: convince someone you can do the thing and make it easy to get in touch. Most of what people spend time on does not serve either.

Five pages is enough

A homepage saying plainly what you do and for whom, a services or product page, prices or a portfolio, an about page with a real photograph, and a contact page.

Five good pages beat twenty thin ones, and thin pages actively harm how a site ranks.

Say what you do in the first line

Visitors decide within seconds whether they are in the right place. A heading saying what you do and where you do it works; a slogan about passion and excellence does not.

Contact details in text

Put the phone number, email and address in text rather than inside an image, so they can be copied, tapped on a phone and read by search engines.

Test the contact form yourself from an outside address. A broken form is the most common and most costly small-site fault.

Register the domain yourself

Register through an independent registrar in your own name, then point it at whatever builder you use. When a builder registers it for you, moving away later can become difficult.

Set it to auto-renew. An expired domain is the most embarrassing outage there is.

The legal pages

A privacy policy and, where required, a cookie notice are legal requirements in many jurisdictions rather than optional. Businesses selling online also need terms, returns information and company details.

Mobile and speed

Most visitors arrive on a phone. Check every page on one, and compress images, which is usually the single biggest cause of a slow site.

Getting found

Claim your free business listing on the main mapping and search platforms, keep the name, address and phone identical everywhere, and collect reviews. For a local business that does more than anything on the website itself.

Write a page for each service you offer rather than listing them all on one, since that is what people actually search for.

Photographs

Real photographs of your own work, premises and team beat stock images by a wide margin. Compress them before uploading, since large images are the main cause of a slow site.

Keeping it current

An out-of-date site costs more credibility than no site. Diarise a check every few months for opening hours, prices and dead links.

Keep a backup of every page of text and every image somewhere outside the platform.

Keep your own copies

Keep all text and images outside the platform, and set up a secure certificate so the site loads over HTTPS.

WHERE TO BUY

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