Get a homepage made.

Strictly speaking the homepage is only the front page; the website is the whole site under your address. In everyday language "homepage" has long since taken over for the whole thing, and search engines read it that way too. We are not correcting anybody here — the distinction matters in exactly one place, and that place is the quote.

If an offer says "creation of your homepage" with a number next to it, nothing has been settled about whether five pages are meant or one. We have seen cases in which a business expected a complete site and received a single page. Both were covered by the word. So ask for a list of the pages included rather than a label.

A second word causes the same confusion. In careful usage a "web page" is a single page within the site and a "website" is the site as a whole. Again: in conversation it does not matter, in a contract it does. If you would rather not have to remember the distinction, phrase your enquiry by content instead of by term — "we need a front page, three service pages, an about page and a contact page" is unambiguous and needs no jargon at all.

Five to seven pages is enough in the vast majority of cases — what matters is not the count but the split by search query. The basic structure that proves itself again and again in small businesses:

• Front page. Who you are, what you offer, who for, where — in the first two sentences, not in the third section. Plus a visible route to getting in touch that does not require scrolling.
• One page per main service. This is the most important point on the whole list. A business offering drain clearing, refurbishment and an emergency service needs three pages, because those are three different search queries. Rolled into one page, each of them loses to a provider with a complete page of its own.
• About the business. Real photographs, real names, the year it started, the region. In small businesses this page decides the enquiry more often than the service page does — people check who they will be dealing with.
• Contact. Address, phone number as a tappable link, email, opening hours, directions, parking. These details have to match your Google Business Profile word for word.
• Imprint and privacy notice. Not optional. The duty to inform under article 19 of the revised Swiss Data Protection Act requires a statement describing the actual data flow of this website — your contact form, your analytics tool, your embedded map.

What you do not need at the start: a blog nobody fills, a case-study gallery without cases, a newsletter without a mailing list. Those building blocks are good as soon as somebody runs them, and harmful as soon as they stay empty. If you genuinely need more scope — several locations, language versions, booking — it is no longer a small site, and the questions of scope and fit for that are set out under web design.

For a small business a homepage has three jobs: be found, build trust, and make getting in touch as easy as possible. Everything else is secondary until those three are in place.

Being found means, concretely: for every service somebody searches for there is a page of its own with a title of its own, and the place where you actually work is named on it. With local businesses the larger share of findability happens off the website anyway, in the map results — how the two work together is described under Google Maps SEO.

Building trust means something different in a business of two to twenty people than in a corporation. It is not seals and slogans but verifiable things: a real address, a phone number somebody answers, photographs of your own team and your own work instead of bought stock imagery, a founding year, concrete details about the area you cover. If you cannot or will not name prices, at least name the pricing logic — "travel within the city included, billed by time and materials" answers more questions than a silent page.

Making contact easy means: the phone number as a link, so that one tap is enough. A form with few fields rather than a questionnaire. A confirmation page that says when somebody will get back to you. And an honest statement of the response time. Where an enquiry needs more detail before it can be answered at all, a guided enquiry route beats a longer form — for Edelweiss Räumungen and Rohrsanova we built exactly that, a configurator in the first case and a quote calculator in the second, because a clearance or refurbishment price cannot be named responsibly without the key figures.

The pure running costs of a small site come to roughly CHF 120 to 350 a year — maintenance and content upkeep come on top, and they are the items most often forgotten in quotes. The individual positions:

• Domain. A .ch address costs roughly CHF 10 to 20 a year depending on the registrar. It should be registered to your company rather than to the agency — that is the only item that cannot be repaired later, only bought back.
• Hosting. With a Swiss provider, roughly CHF 100 to 300 a year for a small site. Cheaper offers exist, usually with the server abroad; whether that is an option for you depends on which data passes through the site.
• Encryption certificate. Included with practically every provider today. If it is billed separately, ask why.
• Email. Mailboxes under your own address are sometimes included in the hosting and sometimes charged per box. A business writing from a free webmail address gives away trust for the sake of a few francs a month.
• Image licences. Only relevant if you work with licensed photographs. Watch the term, and watch that the licence is not restricted to the website if you also want to print the same images.
• Maintenance. Updates, security checks, backups, small changes of wording. Either somebody at your end takes it on — in which case it costs time rather than money — or it runs through a support agreement. A site nobody touches for years does not get cheaper. It only gets older.

What to do with those figures: do not divide the build price by one year but by the realistic lifespan. A site that lasts five years spreads differently from one that has to be replaced after two — and what makes the difference between them is structure and maintainability, not how it looks on day one. The one-off build costs by website type sit under web design, and an estimate for your own undertaking comes from the project calculator.

The most effective way to lower the price of a small site does not run through negotiation but through doing the right parts yourself. Two of them are almost always worth it, three almost never.

Take on the raw copy. Not the finished wording — the notes. What do you offer, who for, in which area, roughly what does it cost, and which five questions always come up in a sales conversation. An hour of your time replaces several hours of research here and produces content no outsider could invent. Editing, structuring and cutting it for search come afterwards.

Take on some of the images. Photographs of your own work, your team, your vehicle, your shop demonstrably carry more weight in small businesses than bought stock imagery — even when they are technically worse. A photo shoot is worth it for portraits and the front page; for the rest, a current phone and daylight are often enough.

Do not take on the legal pages. A privacy notice copied off the internet describes the data flow of somebody else’s website. At best it is incomplete and at worst it is an inaccurate statement to your own customers. That is an assessment here and not legal advice; in case of doubt the text belongs in front of a lawyer.

Do not take on the site structure. Which pages exist and which question each one answers is the decision with the greatest long-term effect and the least visible output. It is made before the design, not after it.

Do not take on the technology after go-live if nobody at your end is responsible for it. Updates nobody installs are the most common reason a three-year-old site suddenly starts causing trouble. And if you are unsure whether a website is the right first step in your case at all, the SEO check gives you a factual basis in a few minutes.

In a local small business a considerable share of enquiries arrives not through the website but through the map listing — and that can be maintained independently of it. Three things belong to it, and none of the three costs budget.

First, a complete business profile. The right category chosen, opening hours current including public holidays, services listed, real photographs, and the phone number and address written exactly as they are on your website. That word-for-word match sounds like a detail and is one of the few points where a small business achieves something through care alone. What it looks like in detail is in our guide to the Google Business Profile.

Second, reviews. Not bought but asked for — ideally right after a completed job, with a direct link. And answered, the bad ones included, calmly and factually. A business that tackles reviews systematically shifts its visibility in the map results more measurably than with any change of wording on the website.

Third, listings where Switzerland actually searches. Directories such as local.ch and search.ch, and the trade directory of your association. The same rule applies: the same company name everywhere, the same address, the same phone number. Contradictions between those sources are one of the most common reasons a business shows up worse on local queries than it should.

If you would rather not do that work yourself, it is the cheapest sensible entry into ongoing support: local SEO starts with us at CHF 300 a month and is, for a local business, usually more effective than a larger website budget.

Six statements decide whether two quotes are comparable at all — and the price is not one of them. If one is missing, ask; a serious provider supplies it without discussion.

• How many pages are included, and which? Listed by name, not as "homepage incl. inner pages".
• Who writes the copy, who supplies the images? The most common silent assumption in both directions — and the most common reason for a supplementary invoice.
• How many rounds of revisions? A number, not a feeling. Unlimited rounds are not a courtesy; they are a project without an end.
• Whose name is the domain registered in? Your company’s. If the answer is different, that is a reason to walk away rather than a negotiating position.
• What applies after go-live? Who updates, who backs up, within what time is a fault answered, what does a change cost.
• Can you change the content yourself? If every price change triggers a request to the provider, the site is not yours. It is rented.

An extra test that takes two minutes and says more about a provider than any presentation: ask to be shown two finished businesses similar to yours, and open their sites on your own phone. How fast does it load, can you find the phone number in five seconds, does the service have a page of its own. Our own projects are under our work — from a restaurant to a stationery shop to a kitchen showroom.

In three starting positions we advise against the job even though it costs us the work — because the money does more elsewhere.

One: your business runs entirely on a platform or on passing trade. A hair salon, a takeaway or a market stall winning every customer from the neighbourhood and through referrals gets considerably more in the short term out of a well-kept business profile and good reviews than out of a website project. The homepage becomes sensible later, not first.

Two: you sell exactly one offer to a very small circle. If your market consists of twenty companies you can all name, no search result decides the contract. A plain, correct page with contact details is enough; the budget belongs in direct contact.

Three: the total budget is below the entry point for a built site. Then the money goes further into photography, a properly maintained business profile and content than into a more expensive shell. We say that in the first conversation, and we have turned work down over it. If you are in that position, the sober assessment of the cheap routes under build a website with AI is a more honest starting point than a quote from us.

And a fourth point, said out loud less often: if you could not serve additional enquiries at the moment because the calendar is full anyway, the right time is not now. A homepage that works creates work — that is the purpose, but it should not surprise anybody.