A small business website that answers customers before they ring
Most visitors to a small business site want one of four things: what you do, roughly what it costs, when you're open and how to reach you. A site that answers those on the first screen, with a contact form that lands somewhere you'll see it, does more for a small firm than any amount of decoration.
The pages every small business site needs
Trades differ (a bakery, a bookkeeper and a bike mechanic need very different photos and wording), but the skeleton is remarkably consistent. The industry guides cover the specifics, such as restaurants or plumbers. The common core looks like this:
| Page | Answers | Include |
|---|---|---|
| Home | Is this the right kind of business, near me? | What you do, the area you serve, one clear button |
| Services | Do they do the exact thing I need? | Each service by name, a sentence on what's included |
| Pricing | Can I afford it? | Fixed prices, or 'from' prices with what changes them |
| About | Can I trust them? | Who runs it, how long you've traded, real photos |
| Contact | How and when can I reach them? | Form, phone, address, opening hours, response time |
| Privacy Policy | What happens to my details? | What the form collects and who sees it |
An FAQ page is worth adding once you notice the same three questions arriving by phone. Write those answers down exactly as you give them.
Prices: show them or explain them
Owners often leave prices off because every job differs. Visitors read the gap as "expensive" or "they'll haggle". A middle path works for most trades: publish a starting price for common jobs and list what moves it up, such as size, materials, travel or urgency. If you genuinely can't price without seeing the job, say what a quote involves and how quickly you send one. The guide to showing service prices goes further.
Opening details people actually check
- Hours, including the awkward ones. Lunch closures, bank holidays, the day you only do collections.
- Where you are, or where you go. A shop needs an address and parking notes; a mobile trade needs a list of towns or postcodes covered.
- How fast you reply. "We answer enquiries within one working day" stops people sending the same message three times.
- A phone number that's answered. If you'd rather not take calls, say so and make the form the obvious route.
Keep these in one place and in plain text, not baked into an image, so they're readable on a phone and by search engines.
How Anticode builds it
As a small business website builder, Anticode works from a description such as "a site for Harbour Bikes, a repair shop in Falmouth, with services, prices from a list, opening hours and a contact form". The Architect confirms the plan and asks where the answer changes the build, for instance whether you want separate Services and Pricing pages or a single home page that covers both.
- Separate pages
- The design engine can add Services, Pricing, About, FAQ and Contact pages, each with its own address, so a customer can be sent straight to the prices.
- The contact form
- Enquiries are saved, sealed at rest and can be emailed to you. A connector can also post each one to Slack, Discord or Telegram, add it to Google Sheets or Airtable, or create a contact in HubSpot when it includes an email address.
- Legal pages
- Each published site gets a Privacy Policy and Terms written from what that site actually does, such as which form it has. Treat them as a starting point to check, not legal advice.
- Your address
- Publish on a free anticode.dev address, or connect your own domain on a paid plan.
Before publishing, the design gate checks basics such as a phone viewport, readable keyboard focus and alt text on photos, and Sentinel checks that the form only posts where it should. If someone else publishes the site for you, they'll need two-factor sign-in on too before a site that collects data can go live.
Keeping it current
A small firm's site goes wrong slowly: an old price, last year's holiday hours, a phone number that changed. Edit text in place in the visual editor, or ask for a change in a sentence ("we now close at 4pm on Saturdays"). Version history keeps your most recent saves, so a mistaken edit can be undone.
Limits worth knowing
- No online checkout. If you sell, buy buttons point to a payment link from Stripe Payment Links, PayPal, Gumroad, Lemon Squeezy, Shopify or Whop. There's no cart, stock control, shipping or tax handling.
- Bookings are simple. The booking calendar offers six fixed times a day over the coming days (Mondays skipped), with no custom hours, deposits, calendar sync or staff rotas, and you confirm each booking yourself.
- No Google Business Profile management. Your map listing is managed separately; keep the hours on both in step.
- Free plan allowance. On the free plan a monthly number of form submissions is visible (100 by default); the rest are held until you upgrade.
Questions people ask
How many pages does a small business website need?
Usually four to six: home, services, prices, about, contact and a privacy policy. A sole trader can fit most of that on one well-ordered page and add pages later.
Can I move my existing site's content over?
You can paste wording into your request or include a link; links are read once and summarised into the brief. There's no automatic import from WordPress or other builders.
Where do enquiries go?
Into your Anticode dashboard, and optionally your inbox. You can also send each one to a team chat, a spreadsheet or HubSpot through a connector.