The first website for a business that does not exist yet
Before the first customer, a website is a hypothesis. What to publish while you are still testing the offer, and what to defer until it is proven.
Topic
Strategy
18 articles.
What a service business of one should put online
A trades business, a coach, a bookkeeper: one person, local demand, no team. The minimum online presence that wins work, and what to skip.
Replatforming without losing rankings
Traffic drops after a migration are usually self-inflicted. The sequence that prevents it, and the two weeks after launch that decide the outcome.
Founder page or company page
When a founder's own page helps the business, when it competes with it, and how to run both without confusing customers or search engines.
Positioning a generalist agency
Specialise and you turn work away; stay general and you compete on price. A realistic path out for firms that cannot afford to pick one client type.
Redesign versus incremental fixes
A rebuild throws away everything that worked along with everything that did not. When incremental change is the better bet, with the arithmetic.
Contact form versus booking link versus phone number
How you let people get in touch changes who gets in touch. Three options, the volume and quality each produces, and when to run more than one.
Raising prices without losing the book
A sequenced method for putting rates up: who to raise first, what to say, and how much churn to expect before the increase stops being worth it.
Agency versus in-house versus freelancer
Three ways to get the work done, three different failure modes. Real cost comparison including the management time nobody puts in the spreadsheet.
Hourly versus fixed fee versus retainer
Three pricing models with three different arguments built into them. Which risk each one transfers, and where the incentives quietly go wrong.
How to structure a pricing page
Structure decides which plan gets picked more than the numbers do. Tier count, anchoring, the annual toggle, and the questions the page must answer.
The one-page site a solo consultant actually needs
A consultancy of one is not a small company. What belongs on the single page, what to leave off, and what a generated page cannot do for you.
Should you put prices on your website
The argument for hiding prices is nearly always a sales argument, not a customer one. When concealment is defensible and when it just filters badly.
The services page that has to rank and sell at the same time
A services page has two audiences with opposite needs. How to structure one so search demand and a sceptical buyer both get what they came for.
How many pages a small company website needs
Page count is the first decision and the one people get wrong. A method for deriving it from services, search demand and who edits the thing.
Pricing and positioning for small companies
Positioning decides what you can charge; pricing reveals what you believe. A working method for firms under fifty people, with the trade-offs named.
The redesign decision
When a website genuinely needs replacing, when it needs fixing, and when the problem was never the website. A decision procedure with costs attached.
What a company website is actually for
A company site does one of four jobs. Most do none of them well because nobody decided which one. How to name the job before spending anything.