Small business website design
A small business website should do one job well: turn someone who found you on Google into someone who contacts you. Ours cost R2 950 to R7 950, fixed, and go live in about two weeks.
What a small business website actually needs
Almost every small business site we replace has the same three problems, and none of them are design problems.
It does not say what the business does in the first sentence. Visitors arrive from a search, give the page a couple of seconds, and leave if they cannot confirm they are in the right place. 'Welcome to our website' costs you more enquiries than any font choice ever will.
It is slow on a phone. Most South African traffic is mobile, often on metered data. A homepage carrying six megabytes of uncompressed imagery loses people before it renders.
Contacting you is work. A form buried on a separate page, no phone number in the header, no indication of which areas you serve or what hours you keep.
Fix those three and a plain site outperforms a beautiful one. That is most of what we do.
How we structure a small business site
The page count follows the number of things you sell, not a design preference. The structure that works for the overwhelming majority of small South African businesses is:
- Home — what you do, where you do it, and how to reach you, in that order and above the fold.
- A page per service — one page per thing you sell, each written around how customers describe the problem rather than what you call it internally. This is the single biggest ranking lever available to a small business.
- An area page if you serve a defined region, naming the suburbs and towns you actually cover.
- About — real people, real history, real credentials. Read more than you would expect, especially in B2B.
- Contact — form, phone, email, hours, area.
That is five to seven pages, which is the Business package at R4 950. It is the size we recommend most often because it is where the return stops improving much for each extra rand.
What we will not do
We will not build you thirty pages targeting every suburb in your metro. It is a well-known tactic and it stopped working — thin, near-identical pages compete with each other and dilute the site rather than adding reach. One properly written area page beats twenty templated ones.
We will not fabricate reviews, testimonials or a portfolio of clients you do not have. It is against Google's guidelines, it is obvious to visitors more often than people think, and for regulated trades it is a real liability.
And we will not sell you a package that does not fit. If your brief genuinely needs custom functionality, we will tell you and quote it separately rather than squeezing it into a fixed price that will not cover it.
Common questions
How many pages does a small business need?
Five to seven for most. One page per service you sell, plus home, about and contact. Fewer than that and you have nothing to rank; many more and you are usually splitting one topic across pages that then compete with each other.
Will it rank on Google?
The build gives you the foundation — correct titles and headings, fast mobile load, a page per service, structured data, Google Business Profile connected. Whether you then rank depends on how competitive your trade and town are, and it takes months rather than weeks. Anyone promising you page one on a fixed date is guessing.
I have no logo and no photos. Is that a problem?
No. We license stock photography as part of Business and Pro, and a logo is R1 800 if you need one. A clean wordmark and good stock beats a bad logo and phone snapshots.
Can you write the content? I do not know what to say.
Yes — copywriting is included from the Business package up. We take it off a half-hour call, write it, and you approve it. This is the step that stalls most projects when it is left with the client, which is why we stopped leaving it there.
Tell us what you need
We will come back with a fixed price, usually the same working day.
Last reviewed .