How to launch a business website in a day (without cutting corners)

Most websites do not take months because they are hard. They take months because the decisions were never made. A day is plenty of time to build a good small business site — as long as the thinking happens before the building.

Do this the night before

Write these down. Twenty minutes now saves four hours tomorrow.

• Who the site is for, in one sentence.
• The one action you want most visitors to take: call, book, buy, or enquire.
• Your business name exactly as you want it written, your phone number, email and address.
• Your prices, or your price ranges, or an honest "from" figure.
• Six to ten photos of real work, real premises, real people. Stock photography is the fastest way to look like everybody else.

The hour-by-hour plan

1. 1Hour one — the spine. Decide your pages. Most businesses need four: home, services or shop, about, contact. Resist the urge to add more.
2. 2Hour two — the homepage. Headline, what you do, proof, offer, contact. Nothing else goes above the fold.
3. 3Hour three — services and prices. One block per service, with a sentence on who it suits and what it costs.
4. 4Hour four — about and contact. A real photograph and a real story beat a paragraph of corporate filler.
5. 5Hour five — the details. Page titles and descriptions, a favicon, working links, a working form that actually arrives in your inbox.
6. 6Hour six — the test. Open the site on your phone. Fill in your own form. Ring your own number from the link. Then hand the phone to somebody who has never seen it.

What to skip today

A blog with no posts. A gallery with three pictures. A booking system you have not tested. A newsletter you have no plan to write. Every one of these can be added next week, and every one of them will eat your day today.

Launch beats polish. A live, honest, four page site earns you enquiries this week. A perfect one that goes live next quarter earns you nothing.

What to fix in week two

• Add your business to Google's local listings and point it at your site.
• Write your first two real pages of content aimed at what customers actually ask.
• Add the extras you deliberately skipped, one at a time, testing each.

A worked example

A mobile dog groomer starts with a photo of her van, a headline that says where she covers, three price bands, a booking phone number and eight photos of dogs before and after. Four pages. One afternoon. She books work from it the same week, then spends the following month adding an area page for each town she serves.

That is the whole trick: ship the honest version, then improve it with real feedback instead of guesses.