How to choose a website for a small business: guest house, restaurant, dentist

Start from your customers’ questions, not from the design

Before you look at templates and colours, write down the five or six questions people ask you most often on the phone. They are the most accurate brief for the site. If everyone asks “Is there parking?”, “Are you open on Saturdays?” or “How much does a scale and polish cost?”, the answers should be visible on the first screen or one page away.

A website has three jobs: to show that you are real and trustworthy, to give the necessary information and to make the next step easy, whether that is a call, a booking, an enquiry or directions to you. Everything else is decoration.

What each type of business needs

Guest house or small hotel. Good photos of the rooms, shared areas and the view; a clear description of what the price includes; a map and directions; check-in, cancellation and pet policies. Decide early whether you take bookings directly (a form, an availability calendar) or only send guests to booking platforms, because that changes the complexity and the price.

Restaurant or café. A menu that reads well on a phone, as text rather than a photo of the paper menu or a PDF; opening hours, including holidays; a one-tap phone number for reservations; an address linked to a map. If you deliver, state the area and the minimum order.

Dentist, doctor or other specialist. Who you and your team are, with qualifications; which services you offer and what a patient can expect at the first visit; indicative prices, or at least the starting price of the main procedures; how to book an appointment. Trust is everything here, so real photos of the practice and the team are worth more than animations.

Where the price comes from

Quotes for “a website” can differ many times over, because one word covers very different things. Break the price into parts:

• Domain — the name, such as your-company.com. It is paid yearly to a registrar and is usually the smallest cost.
• Hosting — the place where the site “lives”. It depends on the type of site: for a simple brochure site it is often cheap, while a site with bookings or an online shop costs more.
• Build — the design and programming. A ready-made template adapted for you costs considerably less than a fully custom design.
• Content — copy, translations and photos. This is often underestimated: if the developer writes the copy or takes professional photos, that is separate work.
• Maintenance — updates, backups, small changes and checking that the site is up. It may be a monthly fee or hourly work when needed.

Always ask which of these are included in the quote and which are extra. A low starting price with a high mandatory monthly fee can cost more over three years than a higher one-off price.

What to ask before you sign

1. Whose name will the domain be registered in? The right answer is: yours or your company’s.
2. Will I have my own access to the hosting and to the site’s admin panel?
3. What exactly is included: number of pages, languages, forms, bookings, translation?
4. How many rounds of revisions are included, and how are extra changes charged?
5. Who writes the copy and who provides the photos?
6. How are backups made, and how often?
7. Will the site work well on a phone? Can I see sites you have built, live?
8. What happens if in a year I decide to change developer — can I take my site with me?
9. How are the rules on personal data and cookies handled?

A serious developer will answer all of this clearly and in writing without taking offence. Ideally the answers go into the contract, or at least into the written quote.

Warning signs

• The domain is registered in the developer’s name “to make things easier”.
• There is no written quote with a clear scope; everything is “we’ll see as we go”.
• Promises of “first place on Google in a week”. Nobody can guarantee that.
• Only the same person can maintain the site, because it is built on a closed system from which the content cannot be exported.
• There are no example sites you can open yourself on your phone.
• A refusal to give you the passwords and access to your own site.

Who owns the domain and the content

This is the most important and most often skipped question. The domain is your address on the internet: if it is in someone else’s name, in a dispute you may lose it together with your email and your search rankings. The copy and photos you supplied remain yours; agree in the contract on your right to use the design and code you paid for as well.

Keep in a safe place: the login details for the domain registrar, the hosting and the site’s admin panel, plus a copy of the contract. We cover this in detail in the article on backups and hosting.

A practical plan in five steps

1. Write down your customers’ most common questions and what you want them to do on the site.
2. Gather materials: logo, real photos, prices, opening hours, descriptions of your services.
3. Ask for at least two written quotes based on the same brief, so you can compare them fairly.
4. Check the developer’s finished sites on your own phone: how fast they open and how easy it is to find the phone number.
5. Sign a contract that states who owns the domain, what is included and how the site is maintained after launch.

After launch, take the time to claim and fill in your Google business profile; for a local business this often brings more calls than the website itself. We explain how in the article on local SEO in Bulgaria.

If you want to see what different kinds of sites look like, you can browse our demo sites; they are useful for comparison even if you choose another developer.