Q&A › Websites
What a website actually does for a business, what the parts are called, and which bits matter.
Most people are sold a website before anyone asks what it is supposed to achieve. These are the questions worth asking first.
Three separate things that people lump together. The domain is the address people type. The hosting is the computer the files sit on. The site is the files themselves — the design, the words, the photos. You can change any one of them without losing the other two, which matters a great deal if you ever want to move.
Usually one thing: turn someone who is already interested into a phone call, a booking or an order. Most visitors arrive having already searched for what you sell. They are not there to be persuaded from scratch, they are there to check you are real, see a price, and find the button. Everything else on the page is secondary to that.
Fewer than you think. A trade or a salon usually needs a home page, a services or price page, a short about, and a contact page with directions. Pages exist to answer a question someone actually has — if you cannot name the question a page answers, it does not need to exist.
A website mostly shows you things. A web app mostly does things — it has logins, saves records, and changes depending on who is using it. A menu is a website. A booking system with a customer account is a web app. The line matters because apps cost more to build and need looking after afterwards.
That the layout rearranges itself to fit the screen rather than shrinking. Most local searches happen on a phone, so in practice the phone layout is the real design and the desktop version is the variant. If someone shows you a desktop mockup first, ask to see the phone.
It is the most widely used website software in the world, which makes it familiar and well supported, and also the most frequently attacked. It suits sites that need constant content changes by non-technical staff. It is heavier than it needs to be for a five-page site that rarely changes.
A single page built for one purpose, usually the destination for an advert. It has one action and no navigation, because every extra link is a way to leave. If you are paying for clicks, sending them to your home page wastes a good share of them.
Age itself does not. What ages badly is the software underneath it, whether it works on current phones, and whether the information is still true. A five-year-old site with the right prices and a working contact form beats a new one with neither.
You can, and for some businesses it genuinely is enough to start. The trade-off is that you are building on rented ground: the reach, the layout and the rules are not yours, and you cannot take any of it with you. A site is the one place online where the terms do not change under you.
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