Most conversations about a new website start with what it should look like. That matters, but it is not usually what decides whether the thing works. What decides that is a fairly short list of jobs the website has to do, and whether it does them on a phone, quickly, for someone who has never heard of you.
This is the list I work from. It is deliberately short, and the order is the order I build in, because the later items are worth much less if the earlier ones are not right.
1. Say who you are and what you do, straight away
Someone arriving on your website has given you a couple of seconds to confirm they are in the right place. The first thing on screen needs to answer that plainly: what you do, and who for.
The trap here is writing something that sounds like a strapline. "Excellence, delivered" tells a visitor nothing. "Commercial and domestic electricians covering Staffordshire and Cheshire" tells them everything they need to decide whether to keep reading. The plain version is almost always the better one, and it also happens to be what a search engine can work with.
Read your own homepage on a phone and stop after the first screenful. If a stranger could not say what you do and roughly where, that is the first fix, and it is a copy change rather than a rebuild.
2. Say where you work
For a business that serves an area rather than the whole country, the coverage area is one of the most-looked-for facts on the website and one of the most often missing. People want to know whether you come out to them before they want to know anything else about you.
Name the towns and areas in ordinary prose somewhere a person will find them. If you work from a premises the public can visit, put the full address in the footer of every page. If you do not, say what you do cover rather than leaving a gap — a business with no location signal at all is difficult for both people and search engines to place.
3. Make getting in touch obvious, and make it real
Every route to contact you should be one tap. A phone number should be a tappable link that dials, not text someone has to memorise and retype. An email address should open their mail app. On a phone that difference is the difference between an enquiry and a closed tab.
The part worth being careful about is the enquiry form. A form is only useful if something is actually receiving what it collects and delivering it to an inbox you read. A form that submits into nothing is worse than no form at all, because the visitor believes they have contacted you and stops looking for another way. If there is any doubt about where a form goes, direct phone and email links are the safer arrangement.
Send yourself a test enquiry through your own form today, from your phone, and time how long it takes to arrive. Do it again every few months. This is the single most common thing to break quietly on an otherwise healthy website.
4. Show that other people have used you
Proof does more work than persuasion. A handful of real reviews, a few photographs of finished jobs, the names of businesses you have worked for where they are happy to be named — any of those settles the question a stranger is actually asking, which is whether you are real and whether you turn up.
Two practical notes. Get permission before you use a client's name, logo or photographs, and keep a record that you have it. And be specific: "great service, highly recommended" reads as filler, whereas a review that mentions the job, the town and how long it took reads as a real person.
5. Be quick, and be built for a phone
Most visits to a small business website arrive on a phone, often on mobile data, often outdoors. That is the condition to design for, not a desktop monitor on office broadband.
Speed is mostly weight, and most of the weight is images. A photograph straight off a camera can be several megabytes and be displayed at the size of a postcard. Resizing it before it goes on the website costs nothing and is usually the largest single improvement available, and it is the first thing I check when a website feels sluggish.
6. Work for everybody who arrives
Sufficient colour contrast, text that survives being enlarged, headings in a sensible order, form fields with labels attached, and a page that can be operated from a keyboard. These are ordinary build decisions rather than an add-on, and the same choices tend to make the website better for everyone. I run an accessibility check on every build before handover as standard for that reason.
What can wait
Everything above is the foundation. A great deal of what gets asked for early is more comfortably added later, once the website is doing its job:
- A blog. Genuinely valuable, and only if it will actually be written. Three posts from two years ago is a worse signal than no blog at all.
- A chatbot. Useful when there is a real, repetitive question it can take off your hands. Not useful as a fixture on a website that gets four enquiries a week.
- Animation and video. Both can be excellent. Both add weight, and weight is the thing you were trying to avoid in point five.
- A full rebuild. Worth saying plainly: on a lot of websites the useful work is a handful of pages of copy, a set of resized images and a working contact route, not starting again.
If you are weighing up spending on your website, spend it top-down through this list. The first three items are where nearly all of the enquiries come from, and they are the cheapest part.
The short version
Say what you do and where. Make contact one tap and make sure it arrives. Show proof. Be fast on a phone. Work for everyone. Add the rest afterwards.
None of this is a matter of taste, which is why I start here rather than with the design. The look of the website matters a great deal for whether people trust it — but it matters on top of this list, not instead of it.
Over the next few weeks I am writing up the individual pieces of this in more detail, and they will appear in this series as they go out. If you would rather talk through where your own website sits against the list, that is what the Web Design page covers, and a conversation about it costs nothing.