This week I built ten demo websites for local businesses, most of them in western Portugal and around Alenquer, plus a pizzeria in the Algarve: a takeaway grill house, two barbershops, two nail studios, a dental clinic, a vet clinic, a car workshop, a building contractor and that pizzeria. None of them asked me to. I made them to show, rather than explain, what a website can do for a business like theirs. Along the way it became very clear what these sites need, and above all what they can do without.
The short version: someone opening a local business's website is almost always on a phone and almost always wants one of four things. To call, to get there, to know whether it's open, or to book or order. Everything else comes second.
The phone checklist
Before I think about colours or typefaces, I make sure these things are on the first screen or one tap away.
- A phone number you can tap. The number written as a
tel:link, so one tap starts the call. It sounds obvious, yet plenty of sites still show it as an image or plain text and make people copy it by hand. - The address, with a link to the map. You don't need a heavy embedded map in the middle of the page. A link that opens Google Maps on the phone with the right destination works better.
- Opening hours, complete and correct. Closing days, the lunch break, Saturday mornings only, summer hours. It's the information most often wrong, and the most irritating when it is.
- The services, with prices when the business publishes them. At a barbershop, "haircut" and "haircut and beard" with the price next to them answer the question before anyone has to call. If the business would rather not publish prices, the site says where and how they are given.
- A way to book or order. For a vet clinic that only sees patients by appointment, it's the heart of the site. For a takeaway grill house, it's ordering ahead with a pick-up time, to skip the queue and the engaged phone line at lunchtime.
In the demos, these booking and ordering flows are simulations: they work on screen, but they send nothing to anyone and say so at the end. See, for example, the grill house demo or the vet clinic demo. On a real site, the request would reach the business and be confirmed.
One language, or two
Most of these businesses only need Portuguese. The exception is anyone who serves tourists or foreign residents. A dental clinic that sees tourists gains from an English version, and it was the only one of the ten where I built one.
Your own photos beat stock photos
I have to be honest about my own demos here: the images in them are illustrative. They give a sense of the place while the owner hasn't seen the site yet. A finished site should not keep them.
A photo of your counter, your chicken on the spit or the wall you just rendered, even one taken on a phone, tells the customer the business exists and that it's this one. A generic photo of a smiling person in an office says the opposite. A few simple rules:
- Natural light, in daytime, and the phone held landscape for the large images.
- The place, the finished work, and the people who serve, if they're happy to be in it.
- Fewer and better. Five good photos do more than thirty in a gallery nobody opens.
The site and the Google listing depend on each other
Many people find a local business through its Google Business Profile and never open the website. That's fine. The profile lets the owner edit the opening hours, the phone number, the website link and, in some trades, the menu or products. The website is where the rest fits: the full list of services, the booking, the story of the place.
What matters is that both say the same thing. If the profile says it closes at 8 pm and the site says 7 pm, the customer doesn't know which to believe and probably calls, or gives up. So when I build a site, the listing is part of the same job: check the hours, put in the right link and use the same business name in both places. It's worth reviewing both whenever the hours change, not just one.
A side note: several of these businesses had no website link on their listing at all, and in at least one case directories pointed to a domain that doesn't open. An address that doesn't open is worse than no address.
What a site like this can do without
- Carousels at the top. Nobody waits for the third slide. One strong image and one clear sentence about what the business does are enough.
- Music or video that plays with sound. Someone in a waiting room or on a bus closes the page.
- "Under construction" pages. If a section isn't ready, it doesn't appear. An empty page makes the business look closed.
- Pop-ups. Newsletters, full-screen cookie walls, "chat with us" after three seconds. On a phone they cover exactly what the visitor came for.
- Filler copy. "Quality, professionalism and dedication" tells the customer nothing they don't already assume. Say what you do, where, and when.
- Ten pages when one will do. For many of these businesses, a good home page and a booking or ordering page are the whole site.
What changes from trade to trade
The list above applies to all of them, but the centrepiece changes. In the ten demos:
- Restaurants and takeaways: the menu as a page, not a PDF, and the phone number or the order button always in sight.
- Barbershops and nail studios: the service list with the price next to each one, and booking in a short flow, without relying on an outside platform for the customer to see what's on offer.
- Clinics: trust first. Who the doctors are, what they do, how to book, and what to do in an emergency.
- Workshops and builders: a quote request with the right fields (make and model, and the fault; or a description of the job and where it is), and photos of real work.
You can see all ten in the demo gallery. They are examples: the copy and opening hours were gathered from public sources and still need confirming with each business before any of them goes live for real.
In short
A good local business website is small, fast and right. Phone, map, hours, services and a way to book or order, with your own photos and the same hours as on Google. The rest can wait.
If you run a business like this and want a site that does just that, and does it well, get in touch. I also look after WordPress sites, if that's what you already have or would rather use.