Website Design

The four things a visitor came to do

Nobody browses a local business website. A visitor arrives from a search result, a Google Business Profile, a review site or a friend's text message, already carrying a job in mind. The site either finishes that job in a few seconds or the visitor taps back and tries the next result. Around Mabank and Cedar Creek Lake the job is nearly always one of four:

1. Call you. A phone number they can tap, near the top, on a phone.
2. Find you. The street address as selectable text, plus a link that opens their maps app.
3. Check whether you are open. Hours, as text, current — not last season's.
4. Confirm you do the thing. The service named in their words rather than the trade's — septic pump-out, not wastewater solutions.

Everything else is secondary. Not worthless — secondary. The story of the business, the gallery and the team page all have a place, and that place is underneath the four things above.

One mechanical detail matters more than it sounds like it should. A phone number should be published as an explicit tel: link — the markup that makes a number dial when tapped instead of sitting there as text. Mobile browsers sometimes detect a bare number and sometimes do not, and the detection fails once the number sits inside a styled heading or a button graphic. An explicit link always works. We will not attach a statistic to that, because there is not an honest one. The argument is mechanical: a number that cannot be tapped has to be memorized and retyped, and some share of people will not do it.

Mobile, desktop, and the version Google actually reads

Two facts get tangled in every design conversation, and separating them saves money.

Google indexes the mobile version of your site. Mobile-first indexing was declared complete in October 2023, and Google's documentation states the rule plainly: it uses the mobile version of a site's content, crawled with the smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking. The consequence people miss is not about looks. Content hidden or dropped from the mobile layout is content Google may never index. A desktop-only sidebar listing your services effectively does not exist, and a reveal-on-scroll panel the mobile theme strips out takes its text with it.

But "everybody is on mobile" is not true in aggregate. StatCounter's United States figures for July 2026 put desktop at 54 percent of web traffic, mobile at 43.85 percent and tablets at 2.15 percent. Local, on-the-go searches skew far more heavily to phones — somebody looking for a dock builder while standing on a dock is not at a desk — but the desktop layout still cannot be an afterthought.

The related failure is content that exists only as a picture: hours inside a photo, a phone number baked into a header graphic, a price list published as a scan. None of it can be read by Google, read aloud by a screen reader, copied by a customer or updated without going back to whoever made the image. Hours are the most-searched fact about a local business, and putting them in a JPEG is the most expensive shortcut in small-business web design.

Five to ten pages, not thirty

Most small local businesses need somewhere between five and ten pages. We will say that plainly because the industry generally does not: page count is the easiest thing to inflate in a proposal and the hardest thing for a non-technical buyer to argue with.

The pages that usually earn their place:

• Home. What you do, where, and the phone number.
• One page for each service you actually want more of — not one for every service you are capable of performing. If you would rather not drive to Athens for a small job, that job does not need a page.
• About. Who you are, how long you have done this, license numbers where the trade has them, and a photograph of a real person or a real truck.
• Contact. Address as selectable text, map link, hours, phone, with a form as the second route rather than the only one.
• Proof. Photographs of your own work, before and after, with a sentence about each.

That is five to eight pages for most businesses in Kaufman and Henderson counties. A boutique with a real product range or a contractor with genuinely different trades justifies more. Almost nobody in a town this size justifies thirty.

What does not earn its place: a blog the business will never write, since an abandoned blog whose newest post is four years old tells every visitor nobody has looked at this site since then. A locations section for a one-location business. A chat widget nobody is watching, because an unanswered chat is worse than no chat.

The failures we find on almost every rebuild

These are not stylistic complaints. Each one costs calls, and each is cheap to fix.

• The phone number rendered inside an image or header graphic. Not tappable, not copyable, not indexable, invisible to a screen reader.
• Hours inside a photo or a PDF. Google cannot answer "are they open right now" and neither can the customer.
• A full-width hero image with nothing on it but the business name. The visitor has to scroll to learn what you sell, and on a phone that is one extra decision.
• A contact form as the only way to reach you. Rural customers call. A form with no visible number reads as a business that would rather not be phoned.
• Services written in industry language. If the page says "comprehensive exterior solutions" and the customer typed "pressure wash driveway", the page is not competing.

A site that does the four jobs in under three seconds on a phone with two bars of rural LTE beats a beautiful site that does not. That is not a defense of ugly work. It is a statement about the order decisions get made in.

When a Google Business Profile and one page beat a full website

Here is the argument against buying most of what this page describes, made properly rather than as a rhetorical move.

Some businesses are fully served by a Google Business Profile plus a single page. Concretely: one location, no bookings, no products, a service area of one or two towns, and essentially every inquiry arriving by phone. The profile already carries your name, address, hours, phone, photographs, reviews and directions, and Google shows it above the organic results. A business qualifies if it either has a physical location customers can visit or travels to customers where they are, and a website is not one of the eligibility requirements.

So what does the one page add? Three things, and they are real.

1. Something you own. The profile is a listing inside somebody else's product. It can be suspended, merged, edited by a stranger through a suggestion, or changed by a policy update you never read.
2. The visit that happens after the reviews. BrightLocal's 2026 survey of just over a thousand US adults found that after reading positive reviews, 54 percent go and look at the business website and 20 percent contact the business directly. The website is rarely the first thing people see and very often the last thing they check before calling.
3. Somewhere for what a profile cannot hold. License numbers, what is and is not included, warranty terms, a before-and-after gallery, the answer to the question you get on every estimate.

That is an honest argument for one page. It is not an argument for twelve. If your entire funnel is "customer finds the number and calls", and it works, then a twelve-page site is a larger version of something you do not need. Fix the profile, get the hours right everywhere they appear, keep asking for reviews, and put one good page underneath. That is an afternoon and a small annual bill, not a project.

What actually drives the cost

We do not print prices inside articles, because a number typed into a paragraph goes stale silently while the rest of the site stays correct. Current figures are published elsewhere on this site from a single source. What is worth explaining here is the structure, because the structure is what lets you evaluate anybody's quote, including ours.

A brochure site is two things: a number of hours of skilled labor, and a small recurring bill.

The hours. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes a median wage for web developers and digital designers. Any firm has to bill meaningfully above that wage simply to exist — payroll taxes, insurance, software, and the substantial share of the week that is not billable. Agency rates are arithmetic, not greed. From there, price is just hours. A five-page site where you supply the text and photographs is a different number of hours from a fifteen-page site where somebody interviews you, drives out to take photographs, and writes the copy from scratch. So ask any quote to be expressed as hours multiplied by a rate, plus a written list of what is included. A quote that cannot be broken down that way is a number somebody picked.

The comparison you have already been pitched. The template builders are a legitimate answer for some businesses, but the honest comparison is not a monthly subscription against a project fee. It is a subscription plus forty hours of your own time against a project fee and none of your hours, on a site you can move later. Two things reliably surprise people: introductory pricing that renews higher, and entry-level plans that take a percentage of store sales the higher plans do not.

How we approach a build here

We have been doing this work since 2003, from Kaufman, for businesses around Mabank, Gun Barrel City, Seven Points, Kemp, Athens and Canton. We do not have a storefront in Mabank and do not claim one — we serve it.

The sequence is deliberately boring. Find out what a customer actually asks you, because the words in your voicemail are the words that belong on the site. Decide the page list before anything is designed, and drop any page without a job. Write the copy first and design around it, since a design produced before the words exist ends up with the words squeezed into it. Build so the four jobs happen fast. Connect Search Console and analytics on day one rather than after somebody asks whether it is working.

Three of our sites are public: EmolaFarm.com, HCFoodPantry.org and MabankOnline.com. What we will not tell you is where a site will rank or how much traffic it will get. Nobody can tell you that honestly, and the people who do are why local business owners screen their calls.