Web Design for Small BusinessesWeb Design for Small Businesses

What usually goes wrong in small business

The three things sold to businesses this size that are usually wrong: a five-figure build fee for a site that needs to cost hundreds; a monthly management fee attached to a report that absorbs most of the hours it reports on; and an ongoing contract with a minimum term that exists to protect the supplier.

The three things that are usually missing: a page for each thing you actually sell rather than one homepage doing everything, a complete Google Business Profile, and anybody counting the phone calls.

And one honest caution. If all your work comes by referral, you have no intention of growing, and customers only want to check you are real, a complete Google Business Profile does most of that job for nothing. You need a website when you want work you are not already getting.

What transfers, and what does not

Every case study on this site is a small business: a paving company, a leasing broker, a sweet shop, a family furniture retailer and a bedroom-furniture store. None of them is an enterprise and none of them was quoted an enterprise price.

Pro Pave is the clearest illustration of what a small business actually gets: 27 pages so each service and area has somewhere of its own to rank, on a bespoke build that renders from eleven requests and loads in 0.68 seconds. The prices are from £500 for the build and £50 a month for hosting and care, published rather than quoted on request.

What you get, and what it costs

The same three numbers as every other page on this site: from £500 for the build, from £50 a month for hosting and care, and growth blocks from £250 a month when you want the site to earn more. No setup fee, no management fee, no percentage of ad spend, no minimum term.

• A bespoke build rather than a page-builder assembly, so it is fast on a phone rather than fast on your laptop.
• A page for each thing you actually sell and each place you sell it, so every search a customer might run has somewhere of its own to land.
• Editable by you, with a walkthrough at handover.
• The domain in your name and the hosting in your account, with a full working copy if you ever leave.
• Tracking that counts phone taps as well as forms, because in most sectors the phone is the majority of enquiries.