A Small Site That Gets Everything Right

What it is

A two-person trade business. Seven pages: home, four services, about, contact.

No slider, no animation, no chat widget, no newsletter box, no video.

One photograph per service and three on the home page, all taken on a phone by the owner.

It loads in about a second and a half on a phone, and the owner maintains it himself in an hour or so a month.

The first screen

What they do, where they do it, and a phone number, all visible without scrolling.

One sentence beneath: how long they have been trading and how many jobs they have completed.

One photograph of actual work, not a stock image and not a slider.

One button, saying request a quote, and the phone number beside it as text rather than a second button.

A visitor knows within three seconds whether this business is relevant to them, which is the only job the first screen has.

The service pages

• What the problem usually is.
• What it costs, as a range.
• How long it takes.
• What happens on the visit.
• When it is not the right service.
• One photograph of that work.

Four pages, each about nine hundred words, each containing something a competitor could not have written because it comes from doing the work.

What is deliberately absent

The part worth studying, since the discipline is in the omissions.

No blog, because he would not maintain one and knows it.

No gallery page, because the photographs live on the service pages where they are relevant.

No testimonials page, because the reviews are on his listing and the site links to them rather than reproducing a selection.

No team page for two people, whose names and photographs are on the about page instead.

No social links, because he does not post and a dead profile is worse than none.

Each absence was a decision rather than an oversight, which is the difference between this site and a thin one.

The about page

About two hundred words.

Both names, both photographs taken on jobs, the year they started, what they did before, and the areas they cover.

Two sentences on the work they decline and who to call for it instead.

A line saying the person who quotes is the person who attends, which answers a question customers have and rarely ask.

Nothing about passion, commitment, or quality, and the page is more convincing for their absence.

The contact page

Phone number, email address, the areas covered, and the hours.

A short form asking for name, contact, the job, and photographs, with a line saying most quotes are given from photographs without a visit.

A sentence saying calls are returned the same day if nobody answers, which addresses the reason a trade often hides its number.

No map, because they travel to customers and their address is not relevant.

The form has four fields, which is the smallest number that lets him quote.

How it was built and what it costs

Built once, by a local developer, for a figure well under what several of the teardown sites cost.

No page builder, no premium theme, no plugins beyond a form and analytics.

Hosting is inexpensive and the domain is registered for several years.

Maintenance is the owner adding a photograph or adjusting a price occasionally, which he does himself because the site is simple enough to.

That last point is the one that keeps it good, since a site nobody can edit becomes a site nobody edits.

What it gets slightly wrong

Since a perfect example would be less useful.

The photographs are inconsistent in quality, and three are noticeably darker than the rest.

Two service pages open with almost the same sentence, which is a small template artefact.

There is no indication of current lead times, which would help somebody deciding whether to enquire.

And the price ranges have not been revised in over a year, which is the item most likely to cause a problem.

None of those is costing him work, which is a useful reminder that a good site is not an unimprovable one.

Where his work actually comes from

Worth stating, because it puts the site in proportion.

Most of his enquiries arrive through his business listing rather than through the website, which is normal for a local trade.

The site's job is what happens after somebody has found the listing and wants to check whether he is any good and roughly what it will cost.

Which is why the service pages carry prices and process rather than persuasion, and why the site does not try to attract anybody.

A business that understands which channel finds it and which channel convinces it builds a different site from one trying to do both with the same pages.

Why it beats more expensive sites

Because every element on it is either answering a question or getting out of the way.

It has one instruction rather than nine, real people rather than stock images, fifteen useful photographs rather than ninety unsorted ones, and pages that differ from each other.

It loads quickly because there is very little to load, rather than because anybody optimised it.

And it is current because it is small enough to keep current, which is the mechanism that fails on larger sites.

The lesson is not that small is better. It is that a site sized to what a business will actually maintain stays good, and one sized to ambition does not.

He can find things on it

A small operational point that explains why the site stays accurate.

The owner knows where every page lives, can change a price in two minutes, and does not need to contact anybody to do it.

Most stale sites are stale because the owner cannot edit them, or fears breaking something, or has lost the login.

Ask, when a site is being built, to be shown how to change a price and a photograph, and do it yourself once before the developer leaves.

A site you can edit gets edited, and that single property does more for accuracy over five years than anything in the design.

What to copy

1. What, where, and a number on the first screen.
2. One instruction, not several.
3. Cost, duration and process on every service page.
4. Names and faces on the about page.
5. What you decline, stated.
6. Omit deliberately rather than by neglect.
7. Size it to what you will maintain.

Step six is the whole of it, since the difference between this site and a thin one is not the number of pages but whether the absences were chosen.

The earlier example in this series is a good small site and why it works.

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.