What Makes a Good Small Business Website?

What Makes a Good Small Business Website?

A good small business website does not need to be enormous, technically complicated or full of flashy effects.

It does, however, need to do its job.

That sounds obvious, but it is surprisingly easy for websites to become focused on everything except the people actually using them. Businesses get caught up in colours, animations, layouts, platforms and what competitors are doing, while more fundamental questions get pushed to one side.

Can somebody understand what the business does?

Can they find what they are looking for?

Do they trust what they see?

Is there a clear next step?

And, perhaps most importantly, does the website actually help the business achieve something?

For most small businesses, those questions matter far more than whether the homepage has a load of distracting animations.

It starts with knowing what the website is actually for

Before talking about design, technology or SEO, it helps to answer a more basic question:

What does the website need to do?

The answer will be different for every business.

A professional services firm might primarily need to establish credibility and generate qualified enquiries.

A restaurant may need to make menus easy to find and encourage bookings.

A manufacturer might need to explain a complicated range of capabilities to prospective buyers.

A trades business could rely heavily on local search visibility, reviews and a straightforward route to requesting a quote.

Another business may not be looking for enquiries at all. Its website might need to support recruitment, provide information to existing customers or help salespeople during conversations with prospects.

Often, it needs to do several of these things at once, and the important part is figuring out the hierarchy and placement of these.

Without that clarity, websites tend to become collections of pages rather than useful business tools. Someone decides there should be a homepage, an About page, a Services page and a Contact page because that is what websites have, but little thought goes into how those pages work together or what somebody is supposed to do once they arrive.

There is nothing wrong with a straightforward five-page website if those five pages contain everything the audience needs.

Likewise, there is nothing inherently better about having fifty pages; the structure should come from the job the website has to do.

People should be able to understand the business quickly

One of the hardest things for businesses to do is explain themselves simply.

When you work in a company every day, you already understand the terminology, the service offering, the difference between various departments and why customers choose you.

A first-time visitor does not.

They may have arrived from Google having never heard of you before or simply clicked a link somebody sent them.

They should not have to work particularly hard to understand what you do.

That does not mean cramming the entire business proposition into the first sentence on the homepage, it means giving people enough context to know they are in the right place.

A visitor should be able to establish reasonably quickly:

• what you do;
• who you do it for;
• what problems you help solve;
• why they might choose you;
• and where they should go next.

This is where a lot of website copy goes wrong.

Businesses sometimes feel they need to sound bigger, more sophisticated or more impressive online, so clear descriptions get replaced with vague language.

You end up with headlines about delivering solutions, unlocking potential, driving transformation or empowering businesses to succeed. They might sound polished, but they often say very little (and are often parroted by every other website in your industry, too).

If you manufacture specialist components for the aerospace industry, say so.

If you provide outsourced HR support for growing companies, say so.

If you build bespoke websites for SMEs, say so.

Clarity is always king.

Good design should make the business feel credible

Looks do matter, they're just not the only thing that matters.

People make judgements about businesses based on what they see, and a website is often one of the first substantial interactions somebody has with a company.

If the site looks neglected, inconsistent or noticeably behind the quality of the business itself, that can create doubt.

This becomes especially important when the service being sold involves trust.

If somebody is considering spending thousands of pounds, entering into a long-term relationship or handing over something important to your business, the website needs to make that decision feel comfortable.

Good design helps with that.

But good design is not the same as making everything look impressive for the sake of it.

It is about hierarchy, spacing, typography, imagery, colour, consistency and all the other details that make information easier to consume and a company easier to recognise.

The best design should feel appropriate to the business.

A solicitor, an architecture practice, an independent retailer and a technology start-up should not necessarily look or behave like one another.

A website should help communicate something about the character and quality of the company behind it.

That is where bespoke design earns its value. Not because every website needs to reinvent how navigation works, but because a business should not feel interchangeable with the next company somebody visits.

The website needs a sensible structure

Navigation is one of those things that can become overcomplicated surprisingly quickly, particularly as businesses grow.

New services get added, old pages stay online because nobody is quite sure whether they can be removed, marketing campaigns create landing pages, different people use different names for the same thing, and the list goes on and on.

Eventually, the navigation starts reflecting the internal structure of the company rather than the way customers actually think.

A good website structure should help somebody move from a broad question to more detailed information naturally.

If you offer several distinct services, giving each important service its own page will usually be more useful than squeezing everything into one enormous Services page.

If you work across several sectors and the proposition genuinely changes between them, dedicated sector information may help.

If prospective customers regularly want to see examples of previous work before contacting you, case studies should be easy to reach.

The question to keep asking is:

What would somebody reasonably want to know next?

That usually creates a much more useful structure than asking which pages the business wants to have.

Content needs to answer real questions

One of the most useful ways to think about website content is to consider the questions customers ask during real sales conversations.

How does the service work?

Who is it suitable for?

How much does it cost?

What is included?

How long does it take?

What happens after I enquire?

Can you work with a company of our size?

Have you done something similar before?

What happens if something goes wrong?

These are valuable questions because people are already asking them.

Your website does not necessarily need to answer every possible objection before someone gets in touch, but it should answer enough of them to help a potential customer feel informed (and you can literally put these questions into FAQ blocks, too...)

Good content reduces uncertainty, which is why thin websites can struggle even when they look excellent.

A beautiful service page containing a headline, two paragraphs and a contact button may simply not give someone enough information to make a decision.

However, there is also a commercial benefit to writing genuinely useful content; if your sales team repeatedly spends the first ten minutes of every conversation explaining the same basic points, there is a good chance some of that information belongs on the website.

The site can do part of that work before the conversation even begins!

A good website gives people reasons to trust you

Every business says it is good at what it does but that is not particularly persuasive on its own.

Claims become much stronger when they are supported by evidence.

Depending on the business, that evidence could include:

• case studies;
• testimonials;
• customer reviews;
• recognised clients;
• accreditations;
• awards;
• certifications;
• statistics;
• project photography;
• team experience;
• partnerships;
• guarantees;
• or examples of actual results.

The right type of proof will vary.

A local plumbing company may benefit enormously from strong Google reviews and photographs of completed work.

A consultancy selling a £50,000 engagement probably needs more substantial evidence: detailed case studies, experienced people and a clear explanation of how it works.

One common mistake is hiding all of this proof on a single testimonials or projects page.

If a testimonial directly supports a service, put it near that service.

If you have completed a project that demonstrates a particular capability, show it where that capability is being discussed.

Trust is more convincing when it appears at the point somebody needs reassurance, not tucked away on a testimonials page.

It should be obvious what somebody can do next

Not every visitor is ready to buy, and that really does matter when thinking about calls to action.

A person visiting your website for the first time may want to read a case study, look at pricing, or book a call.

A good website accommodates those different levels of intent, with the important thing being that people should never arrive at the end of an important page and wonder what they are supposed to do next.

For many small businesses, that means having one clear primary action such as:

Get a quote.

Book a consultation.

Start a project.

Make a booking.

Call us.

But there can also be useful secondary actions.

View our work.

Read a case study.

See our services.

Download a guide.

Find out how it works.

Calls to action do not need to be aggressively repeated every few centimetres. They just need to appear at sensible points in the journey.

Mobile cannot be treated as the smaller version

It is fairly obvious at this point that websites need to work on phones, but there is a difference between a website technically fitting onto a small screen and actually being pleasant to use on one.

Something that looks great across a large desktop monitor can become frustrating very quickly when everything is squeezed onto a phone.

Mobile design should be considered throughout the project, rather than dealt with once the desktop version has been finished.

The aim is not to make the mobile site identical, it's to make the experience equally useful.

Speed matters more than unnecessary complexity

Nobody has ever complained that a useful website loaded too quickly.

Performance can become unnecessarily technical when people start talking about it, but the practical point is simple: visitors should not spend their time waiting for a website to appear.

Large images, excessive scripts, poorly chosen plugins, unnecessary animations, third-party tools and badly configured hosting can all make websites heavier than they need to be.

And there is often a trade-off...

Background videos, animations, live chat tools, etc.

Your analytics platform might provide valuable information on whether these elements are working, but none of these things are automatically bad.

The important thing to remember is that everything added to a website should justify its presence; we are generally in favour of websites doing less, better.

A carefully considered animation can make a page feel polished, but twenty animations competing for attention usually achieves the opposite...

Performance is partly a technical issue, but it is also a design decision!

Search engines need to understand it too

SEO is a much broader subject than adding keywords to a page, but a good small business website should at least give itself a solid foundation.

That means having a clear page structure, useful content, descriptive page titles, sensible URLs, internal links and technically sound pages that search engines can access and understand.

More importantly, the content needs to match what real people are looking for.

If somebody searches for the service you provide in the area you provide it, is there a genuinely useful page on your website that answers that search?

If customers regularly ask a particular question, could you publish something that answers it properly?

This is where SEO and useful content usually align quite nicely.

You do not need to write awkward pages stuffed with the same phrase twenty times, but you do need to understand what your audience wants to know and provide a good answer.

SEO should influence the structure and content of a website, but it should not make the website worse for the humans reading it.

Good user experience and good SEO are, for the most part, two sides of the same coin.

It should be easy for the business to manage

The person visiting the website is not the only user - there is yourself and your team to consider.

Someone has to manage it after launch in order to keep it providing value.

Services change; people join and leave; new projects need adding; articles get published; testimonials need updating; events appear; prices change.

If every tiny adjustment requires somebody to contact a developer, wait three weeks and pay for an hour of development time, updates are likely to happen less often.

On the other hand, giving everybody complete freedom to change every part of the design can create its own problems.

A good content management system sits somewhere in the middle.

It should give the business control over the things it reasonably needs to manage while protecting the structure and design of the site.

At Wilkes Wood, this is one of the reasons we like structured content management.

Rather than giving somebody a blank page and asking them to build layouts themselves, we can create fields around the content they actually manage.

The system should make those jobs straightforward without expecting the client to become a web designer.

A good website is never really finished

Launch day feels like the end of a website project when, in reality, it should be the beginning of the website doing its job.

Once the site is live, you can start seeing how people actually use it.

Which pages are attracting traffic?

Where are enquiries coming from?

Which content gets read?

Are people finding important pages?

Where are they dropping out?

What questions are customers still asking that the website could answer?

Not every small business needs an elaborate analytics setup or a full-time conversion team, but somebody should be paying attention.

In our experience, websites deteriorate gradually rather than suddenly, so regularly small improvements are usually much easier than allowing that gap to grow.

So, what actually makes a good small business website?

There is no single design, platform or page structure that makes a website good, but there are some fairly consistent principles:

A good website understands who it is for.

It explains the business clearly.

It gives people the information they need.

It looks and feels credible.

It is straightforward to navigate.

It provides evidence rather than relying on claims.

It works properly across different devices.

It loads quickly.

It gives people a clear route forward.

And it can continue to change as the business changes.

Perhaps most importantly, all of those things should work together.

There is little value in ranking brilliantly on Google if the people arriving cannot understand what you do.

There is little value in a beautiful website if nobody can find it.

There is little value in generating thousands of visitors if none of them are the right people.

And there is little value in making a website incredibly easy to update if the underlying content is not useful.

That is why we think good websites start with the business rather than the technology.

You and your web partner need to fully understand the audience, what they need, and what the business needs from them, then design and build around that.

At Wilkes Wood, that is how we approach our website projects. We look at the structure, content, user journeys and commercial role of the website before getting too far into how it should look.

The aim is not simply to launch something new, it is to build something useful, because, for a small business, that is ultimately what a good website needs to be.