Web design for small business: hire a designer, or build it yourself

Web design for small business splits into two decisions that get treated as one: what the site needs to look like, and who builds it. Conflating them is how a plumber ends up paying agency rates for a five-page site, and how a firm with a genuinely complex requirement ends up with a template that cannot express it.

Being honest about the incentive here: we make a website builder, so the do-it-yourself route is the one we benefit from. That is exactly why the rest of this is written around when hiring someone is the better call, because a site built by the wrong route is a cost either way.

What a small business site actually has to do

• Say what you do, for whom, in the first screen. The most common failure on small business sites is a homepage that assumes the visitor already knows.
• Make contact obvious on every page. Phone number, form, address, opening hours — whichever people actually use to reach you.
• Load fast on a phone on a bad connection, because that is where most of the visits come from.
• Answer the three questions you get asked on every call. These belong on the site, in the visitor's words, not in a brochure PDF.
• Show proof — work, reviews, credentials, photographs of real jobs rather than stock imagery.
• Be findable for what you do and where you are, which is mostly structure and content rather than design.

When to hire a designer

1. When the brand is the product — restaurants, studios, anything where how it looks is part of what people buy.
2. When the site has a job a template cannot do: a configurator, a booking flow with real constraints, an integration with something you run.
3. When you have tried and the result embarrasses you. This is a legitimate reason and cheaper than pretending otherwise.
4. When nobody in the business will own it. A site nobody updates decays faster than one built imperfectly by someone who maintains it.
5. When you are spending meaningfully on ads. At that point the difference between a two per cent and a four per cent conversion rate pays a designer several times over, which is the arithmetic in conversion rate optimization.

If you do hire, buy the parts that are hard to change later — structure, page templates, the type and colour system — and keep the ability to edit content yourself. The most expensive arrangement in small business web work is a site where every text change is an invoice, because within a year the content stops being updated at all and you have paid for something that is now out of date.

Doing it yourself without it looking like it

• Pick one typeface family and two sizes for body text. Most amateur-looking sites are typography accidents, not layout ones.
• Use more space than feels natural. Cramped is the single clearest signal of an unprofessional page.
• Limit yourself to one accent colour against a neutral background.
• Use your own photographs, badly lit and real, over polished stock images of other people's offices.
• Write short. Two sentences that say something specific outperform a paragraph of positioning language.
• Copy the structure of a site you admire in a different industry, never the visual design of a competitor in yours.

Where we come in

Ettex Sites is the build-it-yourself option: structured pages, forms that land in Ettex Forms, a catalogue and checkout if you sell things. The choosing-a-tool question generally is covered in website builder, and what belongs on the homepage in company description.

What we are not: a design agency. There is no bespoke design service, no plugin marketplace and no custom code deployment. If the answer to the questions above is that you should hire someone, hire them — a good local designer working in whatever tool they know well beats a builder in the hands of someone who does not want to be doing this.