Description

Most small businesses find out too late that their website is quietly costing them customers. Someone hears about you, searches your name, lands on the site — and decides what they think of your business in the first few seconds, before reading a word about what you actually do. If the page is slow to load, doesn’t resize properly on a phone, or looks like it was thrown together in an afternoon from a stock template, that impression is made and it isn’t a good one. The visitor doesn’t file a complaint. They just leave, and you never know they were there.

This usually isn’t because the business doesn’t care about its website — it’s because the site was never actually built as a piece of the sales process. It was assembled from a generic page-builder template, filled in with stock text, and treated as a box to check rather than a tool to make a case for the business. Nobody tested it properly on a phone, even though most visitors will open it on one. Nobody thought through what a stranger needs to see in the first ten seconds to decide you’re worth calling. The result is a site that technically exists — it has a URL, it loads eventually — but does none of the actual work a website is supposed to do: making a clear, fast case for who you are, what you do, and how to get in touch.

Starter Website is built to fix exactly that, at the scale a small business actually needs it. Up to five pages, custom designed on a proven fast theme rather than a generic drag-and-drop template, and tested to work properly on mobile and tablet as well as desktop — because a site that only works on a laptop is a site that fails most of the people who find it. A working contact form and a Google Maps embed mean a visitor who has decided to reach out can actually do it, on the spot, without hunting through the page for a phone number or an address. Basic on-page SEO — titles, meta descriptions, heading structure — is set up correctly from the moment the site goes live, not left as a separate project for later once you’ve already noticed search traffic isn’t finding you.

What makes this different from a template you configure yourself, or an open-ended freelance arrangement billed by the hour, is that the scope and price are fixed before any design work begins. You know exactly what you’re getting and exactly what it costs from the start — no hourly clock running while decisions get made, no surprise invoice at the end. And once the site is live, it’s built so you can make your own updates afterwards: new photos, updated text, a changed phone number. You’re not locked into needing us for every small edit.

There’s also a difference between a site that was built and a site that was designed for a purpose. A lot of small business websites accumulate almost by accident — a page added here, a paragraph edited there, whatever a previous freelancer or a DIY builder happened to produce — until nobody could say exactly what the site is meant to accomplish or for whom. Starter Website starts from the opposite direction: the five pages exist because a discovery conversation established that they’re the five pages the business actually needs right now, aimed at the specific person you want reading them, built to move that person toward a phone call or an enquiry rather than just existing as a digital business card nobody was asked to design.

How it works

1. Discovery. A short call to confirm what the site actually needs to achieve and who it’s talking to — the businesses you’re competing with, the customer you want walking through the door or picking up the phone, and the handful of things that absolutely need to be on the page. This is what the five pages get built around, rather than five pages chosen arbitrarily. It’s also where we settle which five pages actually earn a place — home, services, about, and whichever two do the most work for your specific business.
2. Fixed price and timeline. Once we understand the scope, you get a fixed price and a timeline in writing before any design work starts. Nothing changes partway through without you agreeing to it first — no hourly surprises, no scope drifting upward as the project goes. This is also the point where you sign off and the 50% deposit is due.
3. Custom design on a fast theme. The site is designed around your business specifically, not pulled from a generic template library, but built on a theme chosen for speed rather than one loaded with unnecessary features that slow every page down. You see the design direction before the rest of the pages get built out around it.
4. Build and configure. The contact form and Google Maps embed get wired up and tested, on-page SEO fundamentals get set correctly page by page, and everything is checked on mobile and tablet as well as desktop before it goes anywhere near a review link. This is also where the remaining copy and images get placed into the finished layout.
5. Review and launch. You review the site, we make adjustments, and it goes live. Typical delivery from kickoff to launch is about two weeks, and you walk away able to edit the site yourself from that point on, with the remaining 50% due at launch.

Who this is for: This fits small businesses that need a professional site without the cost or timeline of a larger build — a clear, fast case for who you are, what you do, and how to get in touch, rather than a sprawling site with pages you don’t need yet. It’s the right starting point if five pages genuinely covers what your business needs to say right now, and you’d rather spend on getting found and getting called than on features you won’t use for years.

What’s included

• ✓Up to 5 pages
• ✓Custom design on a fast theme
• ✓Mobile & tablet optimised
• ✓Contact form & Google Maps
• ✓Basic on-page SEO setup
• ✓2 weeks typical delivery

A few of these are worth explaining plainly. “Custom design on a fast theme” means the site isn’t a stock layout with your logo dropped on top — it’s designed around your business, built on a theme selected because it loads quickly rather than one bloated with page-builder overhead. “Mobile & tablet optimised” means the site is actually tested on those devices before launch, not just assumed to work because the theme claims to be responsive. And “basic on-page SEO setup” covers the foundational elements — page titles, meta descriptions, proper heading structure — that search engines use to understand what each page is about, done correctly from day one instead of retrofitted once you notice you’re not showing up in search results.

We start every project with a short discovery step to confirm what the site needs to achieve and who it’s talking to, and from that we send a fixed price and a timeline before any design work begins. That means you know the full cost upfront — there’s no hourly billing and no scope that quietly expands once work is underway.

It’s a one-time project fee with 50% due at the start and the remainder on completion, and typical delivery is about two weeks from kickoff. Once the site launches, it’s yours — built so you can make your own edits afterwards without needing to come back to us for a text change or a new photo, and without any proprietary system locking those edits behind us. If you’d rather we handle the ongoing upkeep instead — backups, updates, uptime checks — our Essential Care Plan covers that without changing anything about how the site itself was built.

If it turns out five pages isn’t enough — you need a blog, more service pages, or advanced forms and integrations a small site can’t support — Business Website is the next tier up, and nothing about this build gets thrown away in that move; the domain, hosting and content decisions you’ve already made carry forward.

Questions people ask before ordering

How long does it actually take? Typical delivery is about two weeks from the discovery call to launch, assuming reasonably prompt feedback on the review step. The exact timeline is confirmed in writing along with the fixed price before any work starts, so you’re not guessing.

What if I’m not happy with the design? You review the site before it goes live and we make adjustments based on that feedback — the goal of the fixed-scope agreement upfront is to avoid surprises on either side, not to hand you a finished site with no chance to weigh in.

What if five pages turns out to be too few? That’s a common outcome once a business starts thinking through everything it wants to say — service pages, an about page, a blog. If that happens, Business Website covers up to 15 pages with a full content structure, and you’re not starting over; talk to us before or after ordering and we’ll help you figure out which tier actually fits.

One-time project. Fixed price, no surprises. You’ll know the exact cost and timeline before any design work begins, and walk away with a site you can run yourself. Secure checkout — payments processed via Stripe, bank transfer, or crypto (Mercuryo). Questions before ordering? Talk to us first.