The Complete Guide to Building a Small Business Website That Generates Enquiries

One of the easiest mistakes to make is to begin a website project by talking about colours, fonts and layouts. Those things matter, but they come later. Before deciding what the site should look like, you need to understand what it needs to achieve.

Start with a few basic questions:

• What does the business actually offer?
• Who is most likely to buy from it?
• Why would someone choose this business rather than another?
• What information does a potential customer need before making a decision?
• What action do you want someone to take?
• What might stop them from taking it?

Showing a designer websites you like can help with visual preferences, but it does not tell you what your own business needs. Two businesses may like exactly the same website and still require completely different structures because their customers buy in different ways.

A plumber, accountant, photographer and restaurant may all need websites, but they do not need the same website. A plumber may want telephone enquiries from homeowners within a defined area. An accountant may need to explain several services and build enough trust for someone to arrange an initial conversation. A restaurant may be more concerned with menus, opening times, location and bookings.

You do not need an elaborate fictional customer profile, but you should have a reasonably clear idea of who you are speaking to. A homeowner looking for an emergency electrician will behave differently from a company director choosing a long-term IT provider. One may simply want to know:

Do you cover my area and can I call you now?

The other may spend considerably longer looking at services, experience, case studies and the people behind the company. The better you understand the customer, the easier it becomes to decide what deserves prominence, and to write about what the visitor wants to know rather than simply talking about the business itself.

People should not have to investigate your website to work out what the business sells. This is particularly important on the homepage. A visitor should be able to understand fairly quickly what you do, who you do it for and what they can do next.

That does not mean squeezing your entire proposition into one sentence. It does mean avoiding vague statements that could belong to almost any company. For example:

Helping businesses achieve their full potential through innovative solutions.

It sounds polished, but tells the reader very little. Compare that with:

Commercial cleaning for offices and workplaces across North London.

It may be less dramatic, but it is considerably more useful.

Many websites explain what the company does but do very little to explain why somebody should choose it. This does not require dramatic claims about being the best in the industry. The reasons are often much more practical. Perhaps you:

• specialise in a particular type of customer
• have been working locally for many years
• offer especially quick turnaround times
• provide a high level of aftercare
• provide transparent pricing
• handle something competitors normally outsource

Sometimes the difference is simply the way the service is delivered. If it matters to customers, it deserves to be communicated properly. A website should make it easier for someone to answer:

Why should I speak to this business rather than one of the others I have just looked at?

A good website does not need dozens of pages. It needs the right pages. For many small businesses, the core structure might include:

• Home
• About
• Services
• individual service pages
• Contact

Depending on the business, it may also make sense to include case studies, reviews, FAQs, pricing, areas covered, a blog or advice section, galleries, team profiles or booking pages.

The structure should reflect what visitors need, not the internal structure of the business. Customers do not think in departments. They think about the problem they need solving or the service they are looking for.

If you provide six very different services, squeezing them all onto one general Services page may make the site harder to understand and harder to find through search. Individual service pages give each service room to be explained properly. On the other hand, a business with one straightforward offer does not need a twenty-page website simply to look substantial. More pages do not automatically make a better website.

A website is also not simply a collection of separate pages. People move through it. Someone might discover a service page through Google, visit the About page, read a case study and then go to Contact. Another visitor might land on the homepage, click into a service and call from there. You cannot control every route, but you can make the likely journeys easier.

For a closer look at how to decide what belongs on your site, read What Pages Does a Small Business Website Actually Need?

If somebody reaches the bottom of a service page, what should happen next? Do not leave someone interested in your service with nowhere obvious to go.

A call to action is simply an invitation to do something. It might say:

• Request a quote
• Book an appointment
• Call us
• Check availability
• View our work

But there is a difference between making the next step obvious and constantly shouting at the visitor. Not every paragraph needs a button underneath it, and not every button needs to say Contact us. Sometimes somebody would be better served by seeing prices, checking availability or looking at previous work before they are ready to make contact.

A person looking for an emergency locksmith may be ready to call almost immediately. Someone considering a high-value professional service may need considerably more reassurance first. The website should reflect that difference.

Calls to action are only one part of conversion. Clear messaging, trust, page structure and removing unnecessary friction all play a part. We look at these in more detail in What Makes a Website Convert Visitors Into Customers?

Most visitors will not know your business personally. The website therefore has to answer some of the questions they would normally answer through recommendation or experience. Can I trust these people? Do they know what they are doing? Have they done this before? Do other customers seem happy?

Trust can be built in many ways, including:

• genuine customer reviews and testimonials
• case studies
• examples of completed work
• recognised accreditations
• clear contact information
• real photographs
• information about the people behind the business

The right trust signals depend on the business. A local builder may benefit enormously from photographs of completed projects and recognisable local work. A consultant may need detailed case studies and evidence of experience. A retailer may need strong reviews, delivery information and a clear returns policy.

Trust should be demonstrated, not simply claimed.

Website design gets a lot of attention because it is immediately visible. The words are just as important. Good website copy should help a customer understand:

• what you offer
• whether it is suitable for them
• how it works
• what it costs, where appropriate
• what makes you different
• what happens next

It should also sound like the business. A local independent company does not need to sound like a multinational corporation, and plain English is usually more useful than layers of jargon. Compare:

We leverage a customer-centric methodology to deliver tailored solutions.

with:

We start by understanding what you need, then recommend the most sensible way to achieve it.

The second version says more while trying considerably less hard.

For many businesses, a large proportion of visitors will see the website on a phone. Mobile should not be treated as a smaller version of the desktop site that gets checked at the end.

Mobile problems are often surprisingly ordinary. A telephone number that cannot be tapped. A contact form with twelve fields. A menu that covers most of the screen. A booking button pushed below three oversized images. Text that requires zooming. None of these are dramatic technical failures. They simply make it harder for somebody to do what they came to do.

Buttons need to be easy to tap, text comfortable to read, and important information such as telephone numbers, addresses and opening times easy to find.

Speed matters too. It is easy for a project to accumulate features because each sounds useful in isolation: a slider, animation, live chat, a pop-up, a video background. None of these is automatically good or bad, but large images, unnecessary scripts and badly configured plugins can all slow a website down.

If something helps explain the offer, makes the website easier to use or supports a genuine business requirement, there may be a good reason for it. If it makes the site slower or harder to use without adding anything meaningful, it probably is not helping. A small business website does not need to win a design award. It needs to work.

Search engine optimisation is often treated as something that happens after a website has been built. That can create unnecessary problems. Basic SEO considerations should influence the structure from the start. For example:

• If someone searches for a service you provide, is there a page dedicated to it?
• Does that page clearly explain the service?
• Does the page title make sense?
• Are important pages linked together?
• Does the website work properly on mobile?
• Does the content genuinely answer the questions potential customers are likely to have?

SEO involves considerably more than adding keywords to a page. A well-planned website simply gives you a much better starting point.

Good website planning is partly about deciding what to include. It is also about deciding what to leave out. Not every business needs a blog, live chat, online booking, ecommerce, a customer portal, complex animation, dozens of integrations or custom-built functionality.

Each may be useful for the right business. But adding functionality simply because it is available can increase cost, maintenance and complexity without improving the customer experience. The question should always be:

What does this feature actually help the business or its customers do?

There is also sometimes an assumption that a professionally built website must be completely bespoke. It does not. Platforms, themes, plugins and established software exist because many common business problems have already been solved. If a reliable existing tool already does the job well, spending money recreating it rarely benefits the client.

Custom development becomes worthwhile when the business has requirements that standard solutions cannot handle properly, or when forcing an existing system to do something it was never designed to do creates more problems than it solves. The sensible question is not whether custom is better, but what the most appropriate solution is for this particular business.

We explore the differences in Custom Website vs Website Template: Which Is Right for Your Business?

Once you know roughly what the website needs to do, you need to decide who is going to build it. Broadly speaking, the options are:

• building it yourself using a website builder
• hiring an individual freelancer
• working with a web design company or agency

There are good and bad examples of all three. A DIY website can make complete sense for a new business with a very limited budget and straightforward requirements. A good freelancer may offer specialist expertise and a close working relationship at a cost that suits an independent business. A company or agency may make more sense where the project requires several different skills, more ongoing support or somebody to coordinate the wider project.

The right route depends on your budget, time, technical confidence, requirements and how much support you actually want. Paying someone else is not automatically the right decision. Doing everything yourself is not automatically the cheapest one either, particularly if it takes you away from work that only you can do.

We compare these routes properly in Website Designer vs Freelancer vs DIY Website Builder: Which Should You Choose?

Website prices vary enormously. You can build something yourself for relatively little money, while bespoke projects can cost tens of thousands of pounds or more. Neither figure tells you what your business should spend.

Cost depends on things such as the number of pages, design requirements, custom functionality, ecommerce, booking systems, integrations, copywriting, photography, video, SEO work and ongoing support.

Budget should also reflect the role the website plays in the business. A simple informational website that mainly confirms opening times and contact details has a very different commercial job from one expected to generate a significant proportion of new business.

A lower-cost website that does everything the business genuinely needs can be excellent value. An expensive website filled with unnecessary functionality can be a waste of money.

For a fuller breakdown of what influences price, see How Much Does a Small Business Website Cost in the UK?

Website projects can take anything from a few days to several months. Complexity matters, but delays often come from waiting for copy, photography, approvals, feedback, logins and decisions.

Preparation makes a significant difference. Reviewing and refining the work is normal, but constantly changing direction can add considerable time without improving the final result.

For a more detailed look at realistic timescales, read How Long Does It Take to Build a Small Business Website?

Launching the website is not the end of the job. Businesses, services and prices change. Photographs become dated. Software needs updating.

Before commissioning a website, it is worth understanding:

• who owns the domain
• where the website is hosted
• who has access and who can edit it
• what ongoing charges apply
• what support is available

These questions are not particularly exciting until something goes wrong. Then they become very important. Keeping a website current does not necessarily mean replacing it every few years either. Sometimes a few targeted improvements are enough.

It also helps to judge the website by what visitors actually do, rather than whether people inside the business like it. Depending on its purpose, useful measures might include enquiries, telephone calls, bookings, sales, completed forms and visits to important service pages.

A local electrician does not gain much from attracting 20,000 visitors if almost none of them live within the area the business serves. Ten good enquiries can be worth considerably more than thousands of irrelevant visits.

If you are unsure whether an existing website needs some attention or a complete rethink, 10 Signs Your Business Website Needs a Redesign looks at the warning signs in more detail.

There is no single formula for the perfect small business website. Different businesses need different things. But the strongest websites tend to have something in common. They make things easier.

They make it easier for customers to understand the business. Easier to find the right information. Easier to trust the people behind it. Easier to decide whether the service is right for them. And easier to take the next step.

That is ultimately what conversion is about. Not tricks, flashing buttons or pressuring every visitor into filling in a form. It is about removing unnecessary uncertainty and friction between someone arriving on the website and doing the thing they came there to do.

If you are planning a new website, start there. Before thinking about colours, layouts or which platform to use, ask:

What does someone need from this website in order to confidently take the next step with this business?

Answer that well, and many of the other decisions become much easier.