Building a business website: an owner's guide from choosing a design to launch day

Ten o'clock on a Sunday night, after closing up, the owner of a small cake shop sits scrolling website templates on her phone. There are more than a dozen tabs open. This one has lovely colours, that one has a font that looks expensive, another fills the whole screen with cake. By midnight she still can't decide.

Monday morning, the shop's LINE lights up with three messages in a row. "How many days ahead do I need to order a birthday cake?" "Do you deliver to Bang Na?" "How much per pound?"

None of the templates in those tabs answered a single one, because nobody had asked the first question that matters: once someone lands on the site, what should they do next?

We see this a lot. The first question owners ask about a business website is nearly always about looks, while whether it brings in customers depends on a different one. So this guide starts there, then works through preparing, picking a design, choosing a builder and launch day.

A good business website starts with what the customer should do next

Before you open a single template, write one sentence: "People who land on this site should ____." The blank has to be an action, not a feeling. "Message us on LINE to order a cake" works. "Feel that our shop is charming" doesn't, not yet.

Every business fills it in differently. A dental clinic wants bookings. A garage wants a call or someone tapping for directions. A tutoring school wants parents to leave a name for a call back. Once you have the sentence, everything else on the site has one job: get people to that action quickly.

Had the cake shop written that sentence first, it would have known the home page needed the price per pound, the order lead time, the delivery area and a LINE button. Pink or cream can wait.

If you want several things, pick one main action. A first screen with six buttons in the same colour usually ends with nobody pressing any.

What you need before building a website is less than you think

Plenty of owners put off a website because they assume it needs a long shop history, a professional photo shoot and a slogan. The first version needs very little, and most of it is already on the owner's phone.

• What you do, who it's for and where you are, in two lines
• Your main services or products with prices, or at least starting prices
• Real photos of the shop, the products or past work, taken on a phone in good light is fine
• The contact channel you actually answer, and when you answer it
• The questions customers message you most, which a month of chat history will show you

That last one matters more than it looks. The questions in your chat are a list of what the site needs. If people ask about prices ten times a day, prices belong on the site. If they ask about parking, answer it right next to the map. We go through turning chat questions into pages in what pages a business website needs.

Choose the design later, and choose it on a phone

Once you know what customers should do next, picking a design gets much easier, because you finally have something to measure it against besides taste.

Customers of small businesses usually reach a website on their phone, from a link on Facebook, in LINE or in Google results. So always look at a design on a phone first and ask one thing: as a customer, can I see how to do what the shop wants me to do, without scrolling to find it?

A gorgeous full-screen photo with the contact button at the very bottom can look great on a computer. On a phone, the customer scrolls through three screens to find it. A plainer design that says what you do, roughly what it costs, and puts the button where a thumb can reach, usually brings in more customers.

Looks still matter, since a cluttered, dated site makes people wonder if you're still open. But design's job is trust and easy reading, not compliments.