Website design in Lombard, IL, when you're starting with a phone number and not much else.

A Facebook page is an address on somebody else's land.

Plenty of good businesses around here run entirely off one. The hours are inside a post from March, the price list is a photograph of a printed sheet, and the messages land in an inbox that buzzes on a phone in an apron pocket. It works, right up until you need to be found by somebody who isn't already searching for you by name.

What a page can't do is the problem. It can't be your address in an email signature. It can't put your services in front of a stranger deciding at ten at night. It doesn't choose how it looks, what sits beside it, or whether it still exists in three years. Keep it, because it's doing real work — just stop letting it be the entire business.

Six lines a first website has to get right before anything else.

You don't need twelve pages. You need the answers people already call to ask, arranged in the order they ask them.

• What you do, said in the words a customer would use rather than the ones on your license
• Where you are, or how far you travel, with a map that opens in a single tap
• When you're open, including whatever the honest answer is about Sundays
• What it costs, or at minimum a range and the thing that moves it
• How to reach a person — a number that dials when tapped, and a form that actually arrives
• Proof the place is real: the room, the truck, the work, and you

The domain and the email come before the pretty part.

A domain registered to you is the first thing you own online that nobody else can suspend, redesign or change the rules on. We buy it into your account rather than ours, along with the Google Business Profile and the customer list, and all three stay in your name whatever happens between us.

Email arrives with the domain. Google Workspace runs it, which means the address a customer hits reply on ends in your own name rather than somebody else's. That reads differently to a stranger deciding whether to hand you money, and doing it right costs nothing extra at the start. The calendar and the shared drive come along, and on Growth the booking page writes into that same calendar.

The photographs already on your phone beat anything we could buy.

Stock photography is the tell. A visitor can't explain why the page feels off, but they have seen that same smiling crew on four other sites this month, and something in them files you under businesses that might not exist.

Send what you have. The bay halfway through a job, the lawn once it's finished, the counter at ten past eight in the morning, your own hands doing the thing you do. Slightly blurry beats borrowed. We crop, size and place them, and we'll tell you which three are worth taking again on a bright morning.

It has to load before a stranger gives up on it.

Somebody who has never heard of you grants the page a second or two without ever knowing they did it. If nothing useful has appeared by then, the thumb goes back to the results and tries the next name, and none of that reaches you as feedback you could learn from.

So the pages are mostly text and images cut to the size of the slot they sit in, with no page-builder software layered underneath multiplying the weight. Nothing shifts under a finger as things settle. Your number can be tapped before the top photograph has finished arriving, and the whole thing behaves the same on a five-year-old handset.

One change a month, because a first year changes constantly.

New businesses rewrite themselves. Prices move once you've done the job twenty times, a service gets dropped because nobody wanted it, the hours settle into what genuinely works, and quite often the thing you thought you sold turns out to be second to something you barely mentioned.

Send us the change and it gets made. One a month comes with the plan, and asking is the only step involved — nobody opens a ticket, nobody issues a change order, nobody schedules a call about one paragraph. That matters more in your first year than it ever will later, which is why it's on this page rather than buried in a plan comparison.

If money is tight this month, here is the honest advice.

Foundation is priced at $250 a month, with $250 once at the start, across a twelve-month term. If you're still finding out whether the business itself holds together, that's a genuine commitment and we'd rather say so now than let you work it out in month four. If it does come to that, tell us in writing: you pay the current month plus one more, and the domain, the Google profile and the customer list leave with you.

Squarespace is inexpensive and it's good. If you like fiddling with that sort of thing on a Sunday evening, you'll do fine on it. What it hands back to you is everything surrounding the site: claiming the profile, writing every page, sizing every image, keeping hours truthful, wiring up booking, and repairing whatever breaks in the week you can least spare an evening. Read that list and work out which is scarcer for you at the moment, the money or the evenings.