What should be on a small business website?

Most lists answer this with design advice. This one starts with what the law already expects of your site, because those are the items you cannot skip, and then adds the handful of things customers look for before they call. If a page on your current site does not serve one of those two purposes, it is probably costing you more than it earns.

The details

Start with who you are and how to reach you, stated consistently. The business's legal name, a phone number that is answered, the towns you serve and your hours belong on every page, not only on a contact page. On a coast where a customer in Duck and a customer in Buxton are well over an hour apart, saying which towns you cover saves both of you a wasted call.

Next, claims you can prove. North Carolina's consumer-protection statute (G.S. 75-1.1 — unfair or deceptive acts unlawful) makes unfair or deceptive practices in commerce unlawful, and a website is commerce. That means no invented review counts, no 'best on the Outer Banks' you cannot support, and no borrowed statistics with no study behind them. Say what you do, what it costs where you can, and what customers have actually said.

Then forms that everybody can use. The Justice Department's position is that the ADA applies to websites of public-facing businesses, and its own guidance names inaccessible forms — missing labels, no instructions, no error messages — as a common barrier. Your quote or booking form is the most valuable element on the site; it should work with a keyboard, a screen reader and an enlarged font.

Then an honest account of the data you collect. Most small sites collect more than their owners realise: form submissions, booking details, newsletter sign-ups, analytics. North Carolina's definition (G.S. 75-66 — what counts as personal information) treats as protected personal information as a name combined with items such as a Social Security number, account or card numbers, a PIN, biometric data or passwords — twelve categories in all. If your site touches any of them, you need a privacy policy that says so and a plan for keeping them safe.

Finally, the pages customers actually use to decide: one page per service, a straightforward pricing or 'how we quote' page, recent work with real photographs, and answers to the three questions you get on every phone call. Nothing else on the site matters until those exist and work on a phone.

Truthful claims, accessible forms, a privacy policy that matches reality, then the pages that sell. Build in that order and the site is both safer and more useful than one that started with the logo.