A Small Site Doing the Basics Well

The site

A two-person appliance repair business, trading eight years, with a site somebody built for them in an afternoon.

Five pages, no animation, no video, a plain typeface, and photographs taken on a phone.

Nobody would call it impressive and nobody would call it anything, which is the finding.

It is the only site in this run where a visitor could complete what they came for without noticing the site at all.

Run it against the last fortnight

• No document standing in for a page.
• No stock photographs.
• No account before a booking.
• One telephone number.
• No sound.
• Contact in the menu.
• Readable on a phone.
• No abandoned section.

Eight of the ten failures examined over the last fortnight are simply not present, and the business did not avoid them deliberately. Nobody sold them any of it.

What it does have

Which is a short list.

A first screen saying what they repair, where, and a tappable number.

Four pages, one for each appliance category, each listing the common faults in the words customers use.

A price for a call-out and diagnosis, stated plainly, with the note that it comes off the repair.

Photographs of the two of them, named, standing beside their van.

And a list of the towns they cover, written as place names rather than a radius.

The absence is the achievement

Which is worth stating because it argues against most of what gets sold.

Everything wrong with the sites in this run was added to them by somebody: the autoplay, the account requirement, the dropdown, the stock library, the document.

Each was a decision, usually made by a supplier, usually with a reason attached.

This site has none of them because nobody proposed any of them.

So the gap between a bad site and a good one is frequently not investment; it is the absence of well-intentioned additions.

That is an uncomfortable finding for anybody who sells websites.

A worked example

The owner was asked what he had spent on the site.

Around nine hundred dollars once, eight years ago, plus hosting and a domain since.

He has changed the prices four times and added one page, each time by emailing the person who built it.

It brings, by his count, most of the work that is not repeat or referral.

He has twice been approached by agencies offering to modernise it and has declined both.

He could not explain why beyond saying that it works.

What it gets slightly wrong

Since a genuinely uncritical piece would be useless.

The photographs are dated: the van in the picture was replaced two years ago and is a different colour.

There is no answer to what happens if a repair is not possible, which must be a common outcome and is unaddressed.

The service area list has not been updated since they stopped covering one town.

And there is nothing at all about brands they will and will not work on, which is a question that must arrive by telephone constantly.

Each of those is about twenty minutes of work and not one of them is a redesign.

That is the shape of maintenance on a site built this way.

Why it beats sites costing ten times more

Which is the pattern across every teardown in this series.

An expensive site fails when the spending goes into things a visitor has to get past rather than things they came for.

The visitor's task is always the same: work out whether this business does the thing, in this area, at a plausible price, and how to make contact.

A site that answers those four in the first thirty seconds has done its job, whatever it cost.

Everything beyond that is either useful or it is in the way, and most of what is added is in the way.

The test to apply to your own

Which is one question rather than a checklist.

Open your site on a phone and time how long until you could answer those four questions if you had never seen it before.

Then count everything you had to scroll past, dismiss, or wait for.

Each item on that count was added by somebody and can be removed by somebody.

Do that before considering anything new, since removing is cheaper than building and usually more effective.

He can update it himself

Which is the property that kept it working for eight years and is worth more than any design decision on it.

Changing a price on this site is an email to one person who replies the same day, and the owner knows that because he has done it four times.

A site nobody can change without a project quote drifts out of date within two years, whatever it looked like on launch.

That is why the stale service area here is a twenty-minute fix and on a more elaborate site would be a change request nobody submits.

Whatever you build, the test is whether the person who runs the business can correct a wrong price on a Tuesday afternoon.

The counter-case within the site

This site would not suit every business.

A shop needs a checkout, a restaurant needs booking, and a professional practice needs more depth than five pages allow.

The site is also genuinely plain, and for a business selling design, craft, or luxury, plain is the wrong signal.

And it has no capacity to grow: a third person or a new service line would need a rebuild.

What travels is not the design at all, it is the absence of obstacles between a visitor and the four answers.

That principle scales to any size of business and any budget you care to name.

What to copy

1. Four answers in thirty seconds.
2. A page per service, in customer words.
3. A stated price for something.
4. Real photographs of real people.
5. Towns by name.
6. Nothing that autoplays or blocks.
7. Count what is in the way.

Step seven is the whole of the lesson from this run, since every failure examined over the last fortnight was something somebody added rather than something missing.

The previous version of this argument is at a small site that gets everything right.

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.