A Good Small Site and Why It Works

What it is

A five-page site for a two-person trade business. Homepage, three service pages, and a contact page.

Built on an ordinary template by the owner, over a few weekends, with no design experience.

It is not beautiful. The photography is competent rather than professional and the typography is whatever the template provided.

It produces more enquiries than three local competitors with substantially more expensive sites, and the reasons are worth walking through because none of them is difficult.

The first screen

A photograph of the owner working, a heading naming the trade and three towns, and a tappable phone number with the words answered until six.

Beneath that, one sentence about what the business does and a button reading Get a quote.

Somebody arriving knows within two seconds what this is, whether it covers them, and how to make contact.

That is the entire job of a homepage, and this one does it without a slider, a video, or a paragraph about values.

The three service pages

Each is roughly eight hundred words and follows the same shape.

What the job is. What it involves, described step by step. What it typically costs, as a range. How long it takes. Three photographs of that work. Six questions people ask.

They read as though somebody who does the work wrote them, because somebody who does the work did.

They contain the words people search for naturally, because they are answering the questions people search with.

And the price range is the reason the enquiries convert, since callers have already accepted the figure before dialling.

The photographs

Taken on a phone, in daylight, of real jobs.

Nothing staged, nothing stock. Each has a caption saying what it was, where, and roughly what it cost.

Several are before and after pairs, shot from the same position, which is the most persuasive thing on the site.

A professional shoot would look better and would not persuade more, because what makes these work is that they are obviously real.

What is deliberately absent

• No slider, so the main message is not competing with four others.
• No stock photography anywhere.
• No animation, so nothing delays reading.
• No chat widget, which nobody would answer.
• No blog that stopped in 2017.
• No mission statement.

The absences matter as much as the content. Each of those would have cost weight, attention or maintenance, and none would have answered a customer question.

The contact page

Three fields: name, phone or email, and what you need.

Above the form, the phone number again, tappable, with the hours.

Below it, one line saying that enquiries are answered the same day, and that quotes usually need a short visit.

That last sentence sets expectation and prevents the disappointment of somebody expecting a price by email.

The form stores submissions as well as emailing them, which the owner set up after reading that they fail silently.

How it was built and what it cost

Worth stating plainly, because the numbers are part of the argument.

An ordinary hosting account, a domain, and a template. A few weekends of the owner's time, mostly spent writing rather than designing.

The largest single effort was the three service pages, which took an evening each and were written by describing what he says on the phone.

The photographs cost nothing, because he was already taking them for other reasons and simply started keeping them properly.

Total outlay for the year is roughly what one of his competitors pays in a month.

None of which is an argument against paying somebody. It is an argument that the expensive parts of a website are rarely the parts that make it work.

What it gets slightly wrong

Worth saying, because a teardown that finds a perfect site is not a useful teardown.

The about page is thin, three sentences, and could carry more about the two people and their background.

There are no reviews on the site, though there are several on the listing, and bringing a few across would help.

The service pages could each name the towns rather than relying on the homepage.

And there is no indication of current availability, which for a trade booking several weeks ahead is worth stating.

None of those is costing much, and all of them are an hour's work, which is the pleasant position to be in.

How it is maintained

The part that decides whether a site stays good, and where most fail after eighteen months.

The owner adds a photograph and a caption whenever a job finishes and he remembers, which is perhaps twice a month.

He reviews the price ranges once a year and changes the figures.

That is the entire maintenance regime, and it is sustainable precisely because it is small.

A site with a blog, a news section and an events calendar would have required weekly attention and would have been abandoned by now, which is the state of two of the competitors.

An abandoned section is worse than an absent one, because a news page whose latest item is from 2018 tells a visitor the business may not still exist.

Why it beats more expensive sites

The competitors are better looking and answer fewer questions.

One has a slider, a video header, and no prices. One has a beautiful gallery with no context and a form with nine fields. One is genuinely elegant and never says which towns it covers.

Each of those decisions was made by somebody thinking about how the site should look rather than about what a customer needs to decide.

This site was built by somebody thinking about the questions he gets asked on the phone, and putting the answers on pages.

That is the whole difference, and it is available to anybody without a budget.

What to copy

1. Trade and towns in the heading.
2. Tappable number with hours, on every page.
3. A real page per main service, with prices.
4. Your own photographs, captioned.
5. Three fields on the form.
6. Nothing else.

The sixth is by far the hardest, because every addition feels like an improvement at the time and most of them are not.

The reasoning behind the price ranges is covered in the page that answers the awkward question.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.