A website for a new business

Publish before you open

A new domain takes time to be crawled, indexed and trusted. Putting a small honest page up months before opening costs nothing and means the site is already known when the business starts trading.

It does not need to be finished. A single page saying what the business is, where it will operate and when it opens is enough to be indexed, and enough to answer somebody who has heard about you.

Our page on getting listed in search covers the steps after publishing, and doing them early removes a delay you would otherwise meet on opening week.

What to put on it first

Name the business and say plainly what it will do, in the words a customer would use rather than in the words of your trade. Then say where, and then say when.

Add a contact route that works from the day it is published. A form is safer than a published address, which is collected automatically and attracts spam. Our page on contact forms covers the shape.

And say honestly that you are not open yet. A page that reads as a trading business and then cannot take work produces frustrated visitors and no benefit to anybody.

What to leave until later

Testimonials, case studies and galleries, for the obvious reason that you have none. Leaving the space empty is correct, and filling it with anything invented is the error that causes real trouble.

Detailed pricing too, unless you are certain. A published price you change three weeks after opening is worse than a page saying what determines the cost and inviting a conversation.

And the long educational material. Those pages are valuable and they can be written once you know which questions customers actually ask, which is a far better basis than guessing.

The pre-opening checklist

Everything below can be done in a day and none of it depends on the business being open. Doing it early means the first week of trading is spent on customers rather than on the website.

• The domain registered in the business name, not a personal one
• A single page live, saying what, where and when
• A contact route that reaches somebody
• The site listed with the main search tools
• A business profile claimed, with matching details
• Hours and service area stated in plain text
• An honest line saying you are opening rather than open

Getting the name and address right

Register the domain in the business name and keep the registration in your own control. Domains registered by a helpful relative or a first web designer are a recurring problem years later.

Choose an address you can live with. Our page on address structure covers the trade-offs, and changing it after you have been trading costs more than getting it right now.

Then use the same business name everywhere, spelled identically. Our page on entity clarity covers why that consistency matters from the very first listing you create.

The first month of trading

Start collecting the material you could not have before. Photographs of real work, the questions people ask on the phone, the objections that come up before somebody books.

Those three things are the raw material for every page you will add. A month of collecting produces a better site than a year of guessing what customers want to know.

Add pages as the material arrives rather than on a schedule. A page written from three real conversations beats one written from an empty page and a good intention.

What not to worry about yet

Design refinement, page count and anything described as a growth strategy. None of them matter while the business is finding out what it actually sells and to whom.

Rankings too. A new domain takes months to establish, and there is no version of this where a site opens and immediately performs. Our page on ranking covers the realistic timeline.

What matters early is being real, being findable by name in search and in an answer engine, and being easy to contact. Everything else is a later problem and it is much easier to solve with customers than without them.