There is a kind of website you recognise in three seconds. It opens with a three-second logo animation. Then comes a carousel of five photographs in which two men in suits shake hands. Underneath it says “Your reliable partner on the road to success”. Somewhere near the bottom, in the footer, there is a small phone number.
A site like that usually cost a fair amount of money. It brings in almost nothing. Not because it is ugly — it isn’t ugly — but because it answers none of the questions the visitor actually has.
What really happens in the first few seconds
Someone who lands on your site has four questions in their head, and they go through them fast:
- Am I in the right place? Do you do the thing I’m looking for?
- Do you do it for someone like me? For my area, my size, my situation?
- Can I trust you? Have you done this before? For whom?
- How do I reach you, and roughly what does it cost?
Anything on the page that doesn’t answer one of those four is decoration. Decoration isn’t forbidden. It just mustn’t stand in front of the answers.
Five things that actually bring in enquiries
1. One clear sentence about what you do and who for
Not a slogan. A sentence. “We install and service air conditioning across Greater Manchester” beats anything containing the word “solutions”. If an accountancy firm could use your opening sentence unchanged, it isn’t specific enough.
2. Proof that you really do it
Photographs of your own work, not stock images. Concrete examples. Client names, where they allow it. Three real references are worth more than twenty logos with no story behind them. Photographs of the process work unexpectedly well too — the workshop, the team, the site — because they are obviously yours.
3. A price, or at least a range
This is the most contested point and the most useful one. Plenty of businesses won’t publish prices because “every project is different”. True. But a visitor who gets no number at all won’t call to ask — they will click on. If you can’t publish a price, publish a starting point: where it begins and what pushes it up. Ours are written out openly in the website price list precisely because “how much” is always the first question.
4. Contact details visible everywhere
A phone number in the header, on every page, and tappable on a phone. A form with three fields, not nine. Nobody will go hunting for a way to reach you — if it isn’t obvious, they move on.
5. Speed on a phone
Most visitors arrive on a phone, often on a mobile connection. If the page takes five seconds to load, you have lost a share of them before they saw anything. It is the only “technical” item on this list and also the most unforgiving — because the visitor feels it rather than notices it.
What you don’t have to pay for
A few things get sold regularly with a website build and deliver very little:
- A photo carousel on the home page. People skip it. The first image gets a few looks, the rest almost none — and meanwhile it slows the page down.
- An intro animation. Every single visit, the visitor has to wait. Fun once, an obstacle the second time.
- Mission, vision and values. No customer reads this. Genuinely none.
- A chatbot on a five-page site. If you have five pages, the visitor doesn’t need an assistant to guide them through them.
- Twenty pages, so the site looks “serious”. Five well-written pages work better than twenty half-empty ones nobody updates.
So how many pages
For a lot of trades and service businesses, this is enough: a home page, one page per main service, references, a price list or at least a starting point, an about page and a contact page. That is five to seven pages you can write properly and keep current.
Only once each of those genuinely says something is it worth expanding — and then mostly with pages that answer specific customer questions. Those also work best in search.
When you don’t need a new site
Honestly: quite often you don’t need a new site.
If your site works, looks decent and has tidy content but is slow, speeding it up is cheaper than building a new one. If the content is out of date, what you need is content written — that isn’t a website build, that is writing. And if nobody finds you, the problem is often not the site but visibility; a new site in the same position in search results will not bring a single extra visitor.
A new site pays off when the old one no longer holds up technically, when it isn’t usable on a phone, when nobody can edit it, or when it doesn’t answer those four questions from the start. Those are good reasons. “It’s five years old” on its own is not.
How this works with us
A site we build and run starts at 27 €/month (the KLASIK plan, up to 9 pages), a larger one at 47 €/month (PREMIUM, up to 15 pages), and if you want to edit the content yourself, at 54 €/month (PRESTIGE) — the price includes hosting, domain, SSL, email and uptime monitoring. Maintenance (updates, security checks and backups) is a separate service from 49 €/month, as are content changes. If you would rather own the site outright, a one-off build starts at 690 €, with the first year of hosting included. Every item is in the price list, and the process is on the how we work page — including the deadline: live within 7 working days of the moment we have your content.
If you aren’t sure whether you need a new site or a repair to the existing one, we can tell you before you order anything — either through a website audit or simply on a short call. Write through the contact form or call +386 40 529 425.