Websites That Work: A Practical Toolkit for Small Businesses

Judge, plan and fix a website that actually brings in enquiries.

Description

Your website has one job: turn a stranger who is already interested into someone who contacts you. Everything else — the design, the photography, the animations — is in service of that. A beautiful site that produces no enquiries has failed. A plain one producing twelve a week has succeeded.

This is worth saying plainly, because most website conversations are about taste. Owners approve designs based on whether they personally like the colours. The only question that matters is whether a stranger with a problem can quickly tell that you solve it, believe you're competent, and find the way to get in touch.

The toolkit covers the five-second test your homepage probably fails, the pages every business site needs, writing copy that persuades, the conversion details that decide whether someone contacts you, speed and mobile, and what a website should cost — with a table of what you should get for the money at each level.

There's a worked example of a landscaping firm that changed nothing about its traffic and went from eight enquiries a month to fourteen, at three times the average job value. The change the owner resisted hardest — publishing a starting price — was the one that did the most work.

What's inside

• The five-second test, and why most homepages fail it
• The pages every business site needs, and the ones that rarely earn their place
• Navigation, structure and naming things properly
• Writing copy that persuades — with a do/don't comparison you can hold your site against
• Conversion: the four reasons people don't contact you, and the fix for each
• Speed, mobile and the technical basics, plus what to ask a developer for
• What a site should cost, by route, and what should always be included
• Who actually visits your site, and why not everyone lands on the homepage
• Legal and housekeeping — including the ownership checklist worth reading today
• A worked before-and-after example
• Self-audit, ten ranked quick wins, 90-day plan, quiz, worksheets, glossary

Who it's for

Owners about to commission a site, owners unhappy with the one they have, and owners who suspect theirs is fine but couldn't say why it produces so little results.

Who it's not for

If almost nobody is visiting your site, the constraint is upstream. Start with SEO or Campaigns — the guide says so on page four.