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Five things every small business website in Pampanga should have

Most small business websites fail on the basics rather than the fancy parts. Get these five right and you are ahead of most of your competitors.

1. A phone number that dials with one tap

Nearly all of your visitors are on a phone. If your number is typed as plain text, or worse, sitting inside an image, they have to copy it out by hand. Most will not. A number that dials when tapped is the single highest value element on a local business website, and it takes minutes to do properly.

2. Prices, or at least a range

This is the one business owners argue about, so here is the case for it. A visitor who cannot find a price does one of two things: they message you to ask, which costs you time and often goes nowhere, or they assume it is expensive and leave. Neither is better than showing a number.

If your pricing genuinely varies, show a starting price or a range and say what changes it. "From 2,500 pesos, depending on size" answers the question honestly and still leaves room to quote properly.

3. Where you are, and when you are open

Sounds obvious. It is missing from a surprising number of sites. Include the full address, a map that opens directions in one tap, landmarks people actually use to find you, and your hours including which days you are closed. If you are inside a building or a compound, say which floor or which gate.

4. Real photos of your actual business

Not stock photos of a spotless office in another country. Customers are checking whether you are real, and a photo of your actual shopfront does that better than a perfect image ever will. Photograph your building from the road, so it matches what they will see when they arrive.

5. Someone who will update it

The most common failure is not a bad website. It is a good website that slowly becomes wrong. Old prices, an old number, hours that changed two years ago. A site showing wrong information is worse than no site, because it turns an interested customer into an annoyed one.

Decide before you build who is responsible for updating it. Either somebody in your business owns that job, or you pay somebody to do it. Both work. Nobody owning it does not.

What you can safely leave out

• An animated slideshow on the home page. Nobody waits for slide two
• A long company history on the front page. Put it on the About page if you want it
• Social media feeds that fill the page with old posts
• A chat widget nobody is watching. An unanswered chat is worse than none
• Stock photos of handshakes

The test

Open your site on your phone and give yourself ten seconds to answer three questions: what does this business sell, where is it, and how do I contact it. If you cannot, a customer cannot either, and no amount of design fixes that.