Practical advice for getting an owner-run business online and keeping it working. These articles cover the essentials a small site needs, taking bookings and enquiries, payments and deposits, reviews and trust, privacy and consent, with worked examples from clinics, shops, restaurants, letting agents and service trades.
Your own shop keeps the margin and the customer list. It does not inherit the search traffic or the reviews. Here is an honest account of both sides.
The dish photograph is the single strongest thing on a restaurant site and most are taken at night under the wrong light. What to shoot, when, and the five dishes worth doing properly.
An empty table on a Saturday is not recoverable. Reminders, deposits and cancellation windows, in the order worth trying them, and the honest cost of the one everybody reaches for first.
Almost certainly not, and that is the wrong question. The useful one is what share of your enquiries could arrive without a fee attached, and what it takes to move that share.
Buyers filter, then read, then enquire, in that order. What a sales listings site needs to survive that sequence, and why the fields people filter on are a much shorter list than the fields they read.
Hiding prices does not stop people judging the price. It stops the ones who could afford you from finding out. When to publish, when not to, and five ways to show a number without a price list.
A brochure site with a contact form will not do the job. Lettings needs structured listings people can narrow, enquiries that arrive knowing which property they are about, and status that is true today.
Plenty of owners discover at the worst moment that the domain is registered to someone else. Four things that can be owned separately, and the questions to ask before you are the one finding out.
Stock photography of a handshake tells a visitor nothing. Seven shots that answer the questions people actually arrive with, all of them takeable on a phone in an afternoon.