Planning and building the site.

Most small business websites fail for the same three reasons, and none of them are design problems.

They are slow, because they were built on a page builder that ships an enormous amount of code whether the page needs it or not. They are vague, because the homepage says "solutions tailored to your needs" instead of what the business does and for whom. And they are hard to use on a phone, because they were designed on a desktop and squeezed down afterward.

Fixing those three things matters more than anything a redesign would give you. A plain site that loads fast, says clearly what you do, and works on a phone will out-earn a fashionable one that does not.

The sequence that works: decide what the site is for and who it is talking to, write the words before designing the layout, then pick the platform that fits the answer — not the other way around. Choosing the platform first is how businesses end up paying a subscription forever for a site they cannot move.

The articles below run in roughly that order, ending with a piece on home service businesses in North Texas, where the urgency of the customer changes what belongs at the top of the page.