Your Website Is Not a Brochure

Many business websites are built like printed brochures: a home page, an about page, a services page and a contact page, designed once, launched, and left alone. The logic is understandable. A website used to be a statement that the business exists. For a long time, that was enough.

Today the website is usually one part of a longer path. Someone sees an advert, hears a recommendation or searches for a problem; visits the site to check the business is credible; then sends a message, fills in a form or taps through to WhatsApp. If the site does its part poorly — or does it well but drops the enquiry at the handoff — the marketing that brought the visitor is wasted.

1. Discovery — being found for the right problems

People search for problems and needs, not company names. Pages that genuinely answer those questions are how new customers find a business. Google's guidance is to create helpful, reliable, people-first content — written primarily to help readers rather than to manipulate rankings — and it asks whether a reader will leave feeling they learned enough to achieve their goal ^[3].

2. Trust — being credible quickly

Visitors decide fast. Nielsen Norman Group's analysis of page-visit data found that users often leave pages within 10 to 20 seconds, but that pages which communicate a clear value proposition can hold attention far longer ^[1]. Credibility comes from specifics: what the business does, for whom, where it is, who is behind it, and how to reach a person — not from adjectives.

3. Conversion — making the next step obvious

Every important page should answer “what do I do now?” with one primary action. Offering five equal options is the same as offering none.

4. Capture — turning interest into a record

Forms, booking tools and chat links are where interest becomes an enquiry. They should ask only what is needed, work flawlessly on a phone, confirm clearly what happens next, and never lose what the visitor typed.

5. Qualification — understanding the enquiry

A few well-chosen questions — what the enquiry is about, rough timing, the kind of business — let the team prioritise and prepare. Too many questions reduce completions; too few leave the team guessing. The balance depends on the value of the enquiry.

6. Handoff — passing the enquiry on intact

This is where many websites fail invisibly. A form that sends an email to an inbox nobody watches, or a WhatsApp link that arrives without context, breaks the chain. Enquiries should arrive in the system the team actually works from — ideally a CRM — with their source attached.

7. Measurement — learning what works

Page views alone say little. The useful questions are which pages and sources produce enquiries, which enquiries become customers, and where visitors abandon the path. That requires tracking actions, not just visits, and connecting them to outcomes in the CRM.

A slow or unstable page undermines trust before a visitor reads a word, and many visitors in Kenya browse on mobile connections of varying quality. Google defines three Core Web Vitals and publishes a “good” threshold for each ^[2].

The most common culprits on small-business sites are oversized images, heavy themes and plug-ins, third-party scripts added over the years, and content that moves as it loads. Most are fixable without a redesign.

Of all the elements on a business website, the enquiry form does the most direct work and gets the least design attention. Every field is a small cost to the visitor and a small benefit to the business. The question for each one is whether the benefit is worth the cost at this stage of the relationship.

Three details matter as much as the fields themselves. The form should say what happens after it is submitted — who will respond, and how. It should keep what the visitor typed if something goes wrong, rather than clearing the form. And it should confirm receipt immediately, on the page and ideally by message, so the visitor is not left wondering whether it worked.

Accessible to everyone who might buy

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are the international reference for making websites usable by people with disabilities; version 2.2 became a W3C Recommendation on 5 October 2023 ^[4]. Its additions include a minimum size — or enough spacing — for targets such as buttons and links, and not asking people for the same information twice in the same process ^[5]. For a business, the practical translation is simple: visible labels on every field, error messages that explain how to fix the problem, enough contrast to read in sunlight, and buttons large enough to tap accurately. These choices help every visitor on a phone, not only those using assistive technology.

• Describing the company instead of the customer's problem. Visitors arrive with a need; the page should meet it.
• Generic claims. “Quality service” and “customer satisfaction” say nothing. Specifics — what, for whom, how, where — build credibility.
• Contact as an afterthought. A contact page at the end of the menu is not a conversion strategy.
• Forms that go nowhere useful. Enquiries emailed to a shared inbox with no owner or reminder.
• No measurement of outcomes. Knowing traffic but not which visits became customers.
• Launch and leave. A site that is never updated, tested or improved slowly stops doing its jobs.