Five things every small business website needs

Before anyone falls in love with fonts and colour palettes, a website has five jobs. Get these right and the design decisions afterwards become easy. Skip them and no amount of styling will fix it.

1. An instant answer to “what do you do, and for whom?”

The five-second test: land a stranger on your homepage and ask them what you sell. If they hesitate, the words are doing too much, or too little. Plain language beats clever language every time. Say what you do, who it is for and why it matters, in the first screenful.

2. One obvious next step

Every page should funnel towards a single action: enquire, book, call, buy. When a page offers four equally weighted buttons, people choose none. Decide what the win is, make that button unmissable, and let everything else be quiet links.

3. Proof it is real

New customers are looking for evidence, not adjectives. Real project photos, honest case notes, words from named clients and a face or two beat any amount of polished marketing copy. If your work is good, show the work.

4. Speed and thumbs

Most of your visitors are on a phone, often on mobile data, often mildly impatient. Compress your images, keep pages light, make buttons thumb-sized and forms short. A fast, comfortable phone experience is worth more than any animation.

5. A human way in

Contact pages fail by being cold or by hiding. Give people a real route to a real person, set expectations for reply times and keep the form to the essentials. Every field you drop is a conversation you keep.

Tick those five boxes and everything else: colours, type, motion & becomes the fun part rather than damage limitation. That is the order I build in, and the order I would check your current site against.