Business Websites
What Should a Business Website Actually Include?
Fewer pages than most proposals suggest, with far more attention on the few that customers actually read.
5 min read
A useful business website is usually smaller than the one being quoted for.
Most sites need a home page, one page per service that genuinely earns money, a page that establishes who you are, and a contact page that works. Everything beyond that should have to justify itself.
The mistake is not building too few pages. It is spreading thin content across many pages and leaving the important ones vague.
Start from what customers ask, not from a page list
Before deciding on structure, write down the questions you get asked before someone becomes a customer. Not the questions you wish they asked. The actual ones, from calls and messages over the last month.
For most businesses that list is short and repetitive. Do you handle this specific thing. Do you cover my area. How long does it take. What does it cost, roughly. Have you done this before. Who do I talk to.
That list is the website. The page structure is just a way of organising the answers so people find the one they need.
The pages that carry the weight
The home page
Its only job is to tell a visitor they are in the right place and send them to the page they need. It is a signpost, not a summary of the entire business.
Within the first screen, a visitor should be able to tell what you do, who you do it for, and roughly where you operate. Most home pages fail this because they open with a slogan.
What earns its place:
- A direct statement of what the business does
- Clear routes to each main service
- The areas served, where that matters to the customer
- A visible way to make contact
- Evidence you are real and active
One page per service
This is the single change that most improves a small business website. A page covering six services covers none of them well, and it gives search engines nothing specific to match against.
Give each service that matters commercially its own page. Explain what is included, who it suits, how the process runs, what affects the price, and what happens when someone gets in touch.
Services that make up a small part of revenue can share a page. The test is commercial, not tidiness.
A page about the business
This page is read more than most owners expect, usually by someone deciding whether to trust you with money.
It should say who runs the business, how long it has been operating, where it is based, and how it works. Specifics do the work here. Vague statements about passion and commitment do not.
A contact page that functions
Every contact route you are willing to answer should be on it, and each should work. That means testing the form, confirming the email arrives somewhere a person reads, and checking the WhatsApp link opens correctly on a phone.
A broken enquiry form is the most expensive fault a website can have, and the one least likely to be noticed, because nothing appears to be wrong.
Pages worth adding when there is a reason
These earn their place in specific situations rather than by default:
- Location pages, when you serve distinct areas and can say something specific about each
- Industry pages, when different sectors buy from you for different reasons
- Case studies or project pages, when buyers need evidence before committing
- Pricing information, when it filters out enquiries you do not want
- Careers, when you are hiring regularly
- Legal pages, which are required if you take payments or personal data
A landing page is a different thing again. It has one job, usually supporting an ad campaign or a single offer, and it works because it does not try to serve everyone. Building one is worth doing when you have traffic to send to it, not before.
- Landing page developmentWhen a single-purpose page makes more sense than another section of the website.
What usually gets built for no reason
Common additions that rarely repay the effort:
- A blog nobody has committed to writing, which then sits with three posts from two years ago
- A homepage slider, which pushes the actual message below the fold
- A gallery of unlabelled stock images
- A testimonials page with unattributed quotes, which reads as invented whether or not it is
- A downloadable brochure that duplicates the website and immediately goes out of date
- Animations that delay the content people came for
Each of these costs money to build and then costs attention every time someone visits.
The parts that are not pages
Some of what determines whether a website works does not appear in a page list at all, which is why it tends to be left out of quotes.
- Where enquiries go, and who is responsible for answering them
- How the site loads on a mid-range phone on mobile data
- Whether page titles and headings describe the page or the company
- Who can update content, and whether they need a developer to do it
- Analytics that record enquiries rather than just visits
- Backups, updates, and someone accountable when something breaks
Related:
- Website maintenanceThe updates, checks, and fixes that keep a site working after launch.
Writing the content
Content is where website projects stall. The design gets approved, then everything waits three months for text.
The way out is to stop treating it as writing and treat it as answering. Take the question list from earlier, answer each one the way you would on the phone, and edit lightly. That produces better copy than most attempts at marketing language, because it uses the words customers use.
Two rules help. Say the specific thing rather than the impressive thing. And if a sentence would be equally true for a competitor, it is not doing any work.
Scope is worth settling before you compare quotes, because two proposals for a website are only comparable if they are for the same website.
We work through the question list, the services that need their own page, and the enquiry process before estimating anything.
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