How to Choose the Right Website for Your Business

The hardest part of choosing a website is resisting the urge to start with features. A list of what the site should have is easy to write and hard to prioritise. Starting from what the site has to *achieve* produces a much shorter list, and a cheaper project.

Start with the job, not the pages

Write down what someone should be able to do after they land on your site. Not "learn about the company" — something you could observe. Can they find your opening hours without emailing you? Can they see what a job costs before getting in touch? Can they work out which of your three services they need?

Every page and feature should trace back to one of those outcomes. Anything that does not is a candidate for leaving out, and leaving things out is where most of the budget is saved.

There are three shapes of website

The third is chosen far more often than it should be. If nobody needs to log in, if nobody needs to see different information from different users, and if there is no workflow to manage, a brochure site will do the same job for a fraction of the cost and with far less to go wrong.

One page, or several?

A single long page suits a narrow offer with one clear action. It is quick to build, quick to load, and everything is one scroll away. Several pages suit a wider offer where visitors arrive knowing one specific thing and need to find it without reading everything else.

• One page if you have a single service, a single location, or one clear call to action.
• One page per service if people arrive searching for that specific service by name.
• A separate page per location or per distinct audience if each needs different information.

Who will update it?

This question decides more than any other, and it is the one most often skipped. If the same person will update the site monthly for years, it needs an editor and proper training. If it changes twice a year, a simple editor is enough and a complex one is wasted cost.

What you are actually paying for

Comparisons are rarely useful because the total is dominated by things other than the build: content writing and photography, hosting and a domain, the email address on the contact form, and any paid tools. Two quotes for the same six pages can differ by a wide margin for reasons that have nothing to do with quality.

1. Ask for a breakdown by component, so you can see what each part costs.
2. Check whether hosting, the domain and the editor licence are included or billed separately.
3. Establish who owns the domain name and the source code. If the supplier does, you are renting your own site.
4. Ask what a change costs after launch. That number matters more than the build price.

Questions worth asking before you commit

1. What happens to my content if I leave? Everything should be exportable in an open format. Ask specifically how.
2. What will this cost to keep running? Per year, not per project. Hosting, renewal and any subscriptions add up.
3. What is explicitly out of scope? The boundary is more informative than the feature list. It is also what you are paying for.
4. How will we know it works? Agree what "done" means before the build, so it is not a matter of opinion afterwards.