Business websites that bring in enquiries, not compliments

What business website development actually means

Business website development means building the site a company is judged by: the pages that explain what you sell, prove you have done it before, and give someone who is ready to buy a way to reach you that actually works. For most small businesses that is six to eight pages, not sixty.

Small business website development, company website development and corporate website development are the same job at different scales here. What changes is the page count and how many people have to approve a decision — not the build standard, the technical SEO baseline, or what you own at the end of it.

The word most people reach for is "brochure site", and it undersells the job. A brochure cannot be found by someone searching at eleven at night, cannot answer the objection that stops half your enquiries, and cannot tell you which page produced the call. A business website has to do all three, and the ones that fail usually fail because they were treated as a design exercise with a contact form bolted on.

Who this is for

• Small businesses whose enquiries currently come from word of mouth and a Facebook page
• Trades and service businesses competing locally, where the phone call is the conversion
• Companies with an existing site that is slow, unmanageable, or built by someone who has disappeared
• Businesses that need to look credible to a buyer who will check them before calling
• Anyone paying a monthly platform fee for a site they cannot move and do not own

Who it is not for

Saying this out loud costs me some enquiries and saves both of us the ones that would have gone wrong. If you are on this list, I will tell you in the first reply rather than after a deposit.

• Businesses that need a store with a cart and checkout — that is e-commerce development, and it is a different build
• Anyone who needs user accounts, logins or a workflow, which is a web application rather than a website
• Companies wanting a large content operation with dozens of authors and an editorial workflow
• Businesses that have not decided what they sell. No amount of design resolves that, and the build will stall on it

The problems it solves

Invisible in search for your own service

Page structure is planned around the phrases buyers type, one primary phrase per page, so pages stop competing with each other for the same term.

Enquiry forms that quietly fail

Mail is sent over authenticated SMTP from your own domain with SPF, DKIM and DMARC aligned, and the delivery path is tested before launch rather than assumed.

A site nobody can update

Content areas are built to be edited without touching layout, and you get a walkthrough rather than a manual nobody reads.

Looks fine on a laptop, unusable on a phone

Designed at 360px first. Most local service enquiries arrive on a phone, often one-handed, often outdoors.

No idea which page produced the call

Conversion tracking is configured at launch, so the site reports rather than merely exists.

Locked into a platform

Static or standard PHP on hosting in your name. Leaving costs you a file transfer, not a rebuild.

What you get

• Up to eight pages: home, services, about, contact and the pages your enquiries actually need
• Enquiry form with server-side validation, spam protection and a delivery path tested end to end
• Mobile-first responsive build, designed against a phone screen before a desktop one
• Technical SEO baseline: a unique title and description per page, schema, sitemap, robots.txt
• LocalBusiness or Organization structured data matching your real trading details
• Google Search Console and Business Profile connected at launch
• Deployment to your hosting, SSL, and redirects from any old URLs
• 30 days of snag fixes after go-live

What is included in the starting price

Everything below is in the $80 figure. Nothing here is quoted as an extra once the build is underway, which is the point of publishing it.

• Up to eight pages, with the page list agreed before the build starts
• Mobile-first responsive build tested on a real handset
• Enquiry form with server-side validation and spam protection
• Unique title and meta description on every page
• Organization or LocalBusiness structured data built from your real trading details
• XML sitemap, robots.txt and canonical tags
• Search Console verification and sitemap submission at launch
• SSL, deployment and redirects from any previous URLs
• 30 days of snag fixes after go-live

What costs extra, and why

A quote that omits these is not cheaper — it is less honest. Each one is real work that someone has to do, and pretending otherwise is how a fixed price becomes a negotiation in week two.

Copywriting

I structure and edit; I do not write your service copy from nothing. You know your trade and it shows in the writing when you do it.

Photography

Real photographs of real work outperform stock badly in service businesses. Worth commissioning, and not something I supply.

Additional pages beyond eight

Quoted per page. Usually the answer is fewer, better pages rather than more of them.

Multi-location pages

Only where each location has something genuinely different — an address, a team, local work. Otherwise they are doorway pages and they hurt.

Booking or payment functionality

That moves the project into application or e-commerce territory, and it is quoted as such.

Ongoing SEO

The build includes the technical baseline. Ranking against real competition afterwards is a retainer, not a launch task.

How the work runs

1. Scope. We agree the page list and what each page has to achieve. You get a fixed number in writing before anything is built.
2. Structure. Page structure planned around the searches you want to win, so the site is not four pages quietly competing for one phrase.
3. Build. A staging URL you can open from day one, updated daily. Three days is short enough that a black box would be most of the project.
4. Launch. Deployment, SSL, redirects, Search Console and sitemap. The site goes live indexed rather than as a blank shell.
5. Aftercare. 30 days of snag fixes included. After that either you run it, or maintenance covers it monthly.

Day by day

3 days from the day scope is signed off. Published as a schedule rather than a promise of speed — you should be able to tell on day three whether a build is on track.

The technology

Deliberately boring, and that is the feature. A stack another developer can pick up is worth more to you than one that impresses other developers.

Markup

Static HTML, or WordPress where you need to publish regularly without calling anyone

Styling

Tailwind CSS, compiled and purged, so the stylesheet contains what the site uses and nothing else

Interaction

Alpine.js where a menu or accordion needs it. No framework runtime on a content site

Forms

PHP with server-side validation, PHPMailer over authenticated SMTP

Hosting

Your existing shared or cPanel hosting where it is adequate, and I will say plainly when it is not

What it integrates with

• Google Business Profile, so the site and the map listing agree on your details
• Google Search Console and a privacy-respecting analytics tool
• WhatsApp click-to-chat, which outperforms a form for a lot of trade businesses
• Calendar or booking tools where an appointment is the conversion
• Review platforms, displayed honestly rather than cherry-picked
• Any documented REST API your business already depends on

What I need from you

Short list, and the first item matters most. Projects do not usually slip because the code was hard — they slip because a decision waited a week.

• A decision-maker who can answer within a day. On a three-day build this matters more than anything else
• Your service list, and what makes each one different from the firm down the road
• Photographs of real work, or a decision to proceed without them
• Trading details exactly as they appear elsewhere: name, address, phone, hours
• Hosting and domain access in your name, not mine

Content and photography

The page that decides whether a business site works is almost never the home page. It is the service page for the thing you most want to sell, and it is usually two paragraphs long because nobody was asked to write it properly.

Write it as if answering a customer on the phone who has asked what is involved and what it costs. That version outperforms marketing prose consistently, ranks better because it contains the words people search, and has the additional advantage of being true.

Performance standards

Targets, not aspirations — measured before handover on a throttled mobile connection rather than on a fast laptop.

Accessibility standards

This site is built to the same standard it sells, and the accessibility statement lists what is conformant and what is not — which is the part most statements leave out.

Security practices

The SEO included in every build

Not an upsell. A site that launches unindexed is a shop with the shutters down, and the work below is cheap during a build and expensive afterwards because the fixes are structural.

Ownership and handover

You own everything: the domain registered to you, hosting in your account, code in a repository you control, and the payment provider account in your business name. Credentials are handed over as they are created rather than at the end.

A supplier who resists this is protecting recurring revenue rather than your interests. If you want the reasoning in full, including how to check your current site, there is a guide on it.

Aftercare and what happens after launch

Thirty days of snag fixes are included. A snag is something that does not work as scoped — not a new feature, and the difference is written down before launch rather than argued about after it.

You also get written handover documentation aimed at whoever maintains the site next, which may well not be me. That is deliberate: the test of a good handover is whether another developer could take over without calling me, and on my projects they can.

Ongoing maintenance

Optional, monthly, cancellable. Nothing here is required to keep what you paid for.

Payment terms

How this compares to the alternatives

Including the routes that do not involve me, because a comparison that only flatters the author is not a comparison.

What could go wrong, and how it is handled

Content is not ready on day one

Flagged at scope. The build proceeds with placeholders and the launch date moves. You hear that on day one, not day three.

The page list grows during the build

Re-quoted before the work happens, never absorbed silently and never discovered on the invoice.

Existing hosting is not adequate

Checked before quoting. If it needs to move, you are told what that costs before you commit to the build.

Nobody internally owns the site after launch

The most common way a good site decays. Maintenance covers it, or a named person does — but it should be a decision rather than an oversight.