Last month’s free website design I helped with was www.rite-price-building-services.co.uk. A local building company I’ve been involved with who do a good local job, and we got onto the subject of websites as I spotted that one wasn’t mentioned on their works van. They had one ages ago but it hadn’t been viable to keep on, and they had been hit by one of the bigger companies offering the world for only so much per month (they had treated him to coffee, and talked about a flashy new website costing hundreds of pounds and then monthly charges for hosting and keeping updated).

The reality is that you can end up with a website you don’t really like, and monthly charges you don’t really need. Keith commented how he actually didn’t like the standard pictures of fancy builders doing whatever as it didn’t show the true picture - fair comment.

So anyway, I offered to do a new one, with a new domain name to save all the hassle of trying to locate whatever old one there was. This can then be added in time to whatever marketing material like flyers, adverts, and even van graphics.

So this website is actually a great example of something so completely simple and simply better than having nothing at all. Keith still needs to go over and update the content, put some real life pictures on, but there’s a fancy version of his logo that I had a graphics designer make up just from a picture of the one on his van. It’s worth asking any graphics designer to come up with a few of these, often easy as they can pop in a standard 3D shape and it looks great.

The other important aspect to having some kind of website no matter how simple is that it can be used in other online information, whether directory listings, social media profiles – over time it can become a central hub to link back to, and if you’re using the right basic software you can then improve and add features over time.

The one thing I didn’t do here was the new Google My Business set up. Here you don’t even need a website, as Google is bringing together all kinds of Google features to help local businesses get online – here’s an old post on the former Google Places and getting your business on Google, with more eon the current changes soon.