Websites that do more than sit there

The short version

Most small business websites are a brochure nobody asked for. They load, they list the services, they have a contact form somebody checks on Fridays, and they bring in almost nothing. The owner half-knows this, which is why the site gets redesigned every four years and performs identically each time. The problem is rarely the design.

• A website earns its keep by doing one job well: getting the right stranger to make contact. Everything else is decoration.

• If a hosted builder fits, use it. Five pages and a contact form is a $20-a-month problem, not a $4,000 one.

• Come to us when the site has to do something — quote, book, gate content, hold a real catalog, or rank against businesses spending money on it.

• A marketing site starts around $4,000 over two to four weeks, with the copywriting, design and search groundwork included.

• Speed is not a nice-to-have. A site that takes four seconds to load has already lost a share of the people who clicked.

Why most small business sites bring in nothing

Not because they are ugly. The overwhelming majority of underperforming sites are perfectly presentable, which is what makes the problem so hard to see from the inside. They fail for reasons that have nothing to do with how they look.

The four we would look for first:

• It talks about the business instead of the visitor. "Founded in 2009, we pride ourselves on quality" answers a question nobody asked.

• It never names the problem the visitor arrived with, so the visitor never gets the flash of recognition that makes them keep reading.

• There is nothing to do except "Contact us" — no price guidance, no next step, no reason to act today rather than next quarter.

• Nobody can find it, because it was never built to be found and nothing has been written since launch.

The last one compounds. A site with no reason to be indexed gets no traffic, no traffic means no evidence about what works, and with no evidence the next redesign is another guess with a nicer font.

Squarespace and Wix are often the right answer

That answer costs us the work, and it is still the right one more often than not. Hosted builders are good products. They are fast to set up, cheap to run, and they handle hosting, SSL and updates so you never think about any of it.

The honest dividing line is whether the site is a document or a piece of software. A document is a solved problem and you should not pay us to solve it again. Once the site has to make a decision — what this customer sees, what that job costs, which slot is free — it has stopped being a document.

What we build, and what is included

A site built the same way as everything else here: Laravel and PHP, hand-written, no page builder and no theme to fight. What makes it a website project rather than an application project is what comes bundled with it.

• Copywriting — written from an interview with you rather than a questionnaire, because the useful material is how you already explain the work on the phone. You approve every word.

• Design — laid out for the way people actually read a page, on a phone first, since that is where most of your visitors are.

• Search groundwork — the structure, the headings, the metadata and the schema markup, built in during the build rather than bolted on by somebody else afterwards.

• Speed — a site that renders immediately, because every second of load time costs you a measurable share of the people who clicked.

• An admin panel, when you want one — so you can change your own copy, prices and pages without booking a developer.

• Analytics that respect your visitors and still tell you what is working.

We will also build from someone else's design. If you have a designer you like, or a brand book you have already paid for, send it — implementing a design faithfully is a normal part of the job and it takes the design cost out of the quote.

Search strategy, minus the mythology

Search is not a service we sell you on a retainer. It is a set of decisions made during the build, most of which cost nothing extra at that point and are expensive to retrofit later.

What actually moves the needle for a small business:

• One page per thing you want to be found for. A single "Services" page listing nine services will not rank for any of the nine.

• Language your customers use, not the language your industry uses internally. People search for what they call it.

• A local footprint that agrees with itself — the same business name, address and phone everywhere, including your Google Business Profile.

• Structured data, so search engines can read what your pages are rather than guessing.

• Genuine answers to genuine questions. The pages that earn traffic are the ones that settle something a buyer was actually wondering about.

• Speed and mobile behavior, which are ranking inputs and also the reason people stay.

What we will not do is promise you a position. Anyone guaranteeing a number-one ranking is either buying ads or lying, and the honest version — this is a compounding investment that takes months — is a worse sales pitch and a better description of reality.

What a website costs

The cheapest work on this site, and the most likely to end with us telling you not to buy it.

The first call is free. Beyond that, discovery and design are billed as one piece of work — $1,500 to $3,000 — and credited in full against the build if you go ahead, with the copy and layout yours either way.

What moves the number is page count and how much of the writing falls to us. A five-page site where you supply the copy is a different job from a twenty-page site that needs interviewing, drafting and two rounds of edits.

When the website is really an application

This happens more often than people expect, and it is worth spotting before you brief a website rather than after. The tell is a sentence in the brief that starts "and then they can" — book, quote, log in, upload, track, pay.

At that point you are describing a custom web application with a marketing site attached, and the two are usually built as one project. Booking and payment specifically are covered in e-commerce and booking platforms.

None of that makes the website part more expensive. It just means the quote should cover what you actually want, rather than arriving as a change order in week three.

What you own, and what happens after launch

The code, the repository, the domain and the hosting account, all in your name, built on open-source tools with no license that grows with your traffic. No proprietary builder to stay subscribed to, and nothing that stops another developer picking it up.

After launch a website needs less attention than an application, but it does need some: certificates renew, dependencies get security advisories, and content goes stale. That is covered by the Anvil Care Plan if you want it handled, and perfectly manageable in-house if you would rather.

If you are replacing an existing site, say so early. The addresses of pages that already rank are an asset, and mapping them across to the new site is a small job at the start of a project and an expensive recovery six months after launch.