Website design and build packages for small businesses.

Designing an SME website is very different from your average design project. It requires a wide skill set and is a real team effort.

Website design is fluid and should be conversion-optimised. It’s outside the realm of print-based design and needs to take in considerations such as:

• User experience (UX and UI)
• Technical optimisation
• Conversion rate optimisation (CRO)
• SEO considerations
• Google’s page speed tests
• Animations
• Micro-interactions
• Colour theory
• Content strategy
• Performance optimisation
• Server load and speed optimisation
• Information Architecture

These considerations require a team experienced in all aspects of small business website optimisation – to a single designer, a website design project can be simply the ‘look and feel’ when, in reality, it is so much more than that.

Considering the above, there is more to a website design project than you might think.

Designing a website for a small business starts with planning the website, not with creating slick visuals.

Something we always say to small business clients is to write what they need the website to say before we start designing what it will look like.

Content should lead the design, not vice versa, so our process often looks something like this:

1. What does the website need to achieve (business goals)
2. Target audience
3. Market trends
4. Content strategy
5. What keywords should the site rank for (SEO strategy)
6. What is the structure of the site (SEO strategy)
7. What types of content need to go on each page (SEO strategy)
8. How competitive is your niche in the SERPs (search engine results pages)
9. Content planning (structure and information architecture)
10. Wireframes
11. Look/feel design concepts (UX and CRO considerations)
12. Key page design layouts (UX and CRO considerations)
13. Block design (reusable content blocks)
14. And more…

Note that the ‘design’ work does not start until point 11 above.

If you approach design alone as the solution, you will end up with a site that looks great but does nothing.

Note that we do have in-house copywriters at Toast, and we can help you with the copy for your small business website – getting this right is crucial.

Don’t get caught out on this one – make sure your design is bespoke, not some off-the-shelf thing that’s coloured-in.

Unfortunately, some website designers don’t always tell you what they are doing.

With popular CMSs like WordPress or Shopify, you can buy ready-made ‘designs’ for less than a hundred bucks and swap out the logo, fonts and colour scheme.

You may think you are getting a bespoke design, but in reality, you are getting a generic website design that 1000s of other companies use.

Small business websites mustn’t be built on the same clunky code as 1000s of other SME websites as Google can see these as clones – to really get your SME website surfacing in the search, a completely bespoke approach will set you apart from your competition.

This happens when ‘designers’ get used to using a specific theme, and all their website designs are designed to work with the theme they use rather than creating a design that works for your brand.

At Toast, we decouple the design and build process. The design team creates what you need, and the dev team builds it.

As a small business owner, the last thing you need is to constantly incur costs to manage your own website.

We use WordPress to build all the SME sites we create, which means you have control over everything—from the logo in the header to the menus in the website footer.

This means that once the site is built, you can manage all the content yourself, quickly making edits and updates to your site without incurring development fees.

This approach is crucial for SMEs as websites need to be flexible and cost-effective to maintain.

Most SMEs don’t want the added hassle of managing a hosting account, so we take care of all that too.

We host our websites on Google Datacenters in London, and they are backed-up nightly with SSL certificates included in the fees.

As we manage the hosting for you, any issues that may arise are dealt with quickly by our in-house team.

As a design agency with over 25 years working in websites, print and branding, we know a thing or two about how to get the best SME website.

When you work with us, you’ll benefit from our input into the project from many different levels:

Strategy – the what, who, why and when

Planning – we’ve built 100s of large corporate websites, so your small site benefits from our experience

Design – our dedicated branding and web design team will guide you to best-practice designs for your site

Build – world-class website built on a bespoke WordPress CMS so your site is fast and SEO-ready.

Hosting – host your site on our WP Engine servers for the best speed and security there is

Support – we don’t leave you at go-live – we have ongoing support and SEO options

Everything we do for small business websites is done in-house by our own team of employees. We outsource nothing.