22 September 2026
What a Birmingham business actually needs from a website
Most of the small business websites I look at are not bad. They are just built to answer a question nobody asked.
Somebody, at some point, decided the business needed a website. A designer produced something that looked respectable. It went live, everyone agreed it was much better than the old one, and then it sat there. Two years later it is still sitting there, and nobody can say what it has actually done for the business in that time.
That is the real problem, and it is not a design problem. Here is what I would look at instead.
It has to be found, which is mostly not about the website
The single biggest thing for a local business is not on your website at all. It is your Google Business Profile, the listing that produces the map and the three results above everything else when somebody searches for a service near them.
If you have not claimed it, claim it. If you have claimed it and never filled it in, fill it in. Categories, service areas, opening hours, a description that reads like a human wrote it, photographs of the real place or the real work. That listing is what puts you in the map results, and the map results are what most people tap.
The website's job in that arrangement is to be the thing that confirms the decision. Someone taps through, spends about eight seconds deciding whether you look like a real business that will answer the phone, and either rings you or goes back to the list.
It has to load before they give up
Eight seconds is the whole allowance, and a slow site spends most of it on a blank screen.
This is the part where the industry has genuinely made things worse. A page carrying four tracking scripts, a slider, a chat widget, an animation library and eleven web fonts will feel fine on the office wifi where it was built and terrible on mobile data outside a customer's house. That second situation is the one that matters, because that is where most of your visitors are.
You do not need to understand any of the technical detail to check this. Open your own site on your phone, off wifi, somewhere with ordinary signal. Count. If you have time to notice you are waiting, you are losing people who had less patience than you and no reason to be loyal.
It has to make the next step obvious
Once somebody has decided you look plausible, they want to do one thing. Ring you, book something, or send a message.
Most sites make that harder than it needs to be. The phone number is an image, so tapping it does nothing. The contact form asks nine questions when three would do. The booking link goes to a separate system that looks like a different company entirely, which is exactly the moment people quietly leave.
Pick the one action that matters most for your business. Put it in the first screenful, put it again at the bottom of every page, and make sure it works on a phone held in one hand.
What this looks like in practice
For a lot of the businesses I work with around Sutton Coldfield and Great Barr, the honest answer is not a big website.
It is a handful of genuinely good pages. One that says what you do and where you do it. One for each main service, written using the words customers actually search for rather than the words your trade uses internally. Something that proves you are real, whether that is photographs of finished work, named reviews, or a list of places you have worked. And a contact route that takes one tap.
That is a more focused project than most people expect when they start asking about a website, and it will outperform the sprawling version that takes four months and never quite gets finished.
There is more detail on how we approach web development, and on the particular mix of businesses in Sutton Coldfield.
It has to prove you are real
The thing most local sites skip is evidence, and it is usually the thing that decides it.
Somebody choosing between you and two others has no way to tell which of you does good work. They are looking for anything concrete. Photographs of jobs you actually finished, not stock images. Reviews with names attached. The streets and areas you genuinely cover. How long you have been doing it. A company number in the footer, which quietly signals that you are a registered business rather than an account someone opened last week.
None of that is difficult to produce. It just requires deciding it matters enough to gather, and most sites never do, which is exactly why it works so well when you bother.
The test for any of it is the same. A year from now, can you point at something the website did? If the answer is no, it was decoration, and decoration is the kind you cannot justify building twice.