Brochure website — when it is enough and what has to be on it

A brochure site has one job: to confirm you exist and lead to a conversation. Not to sell, not to build a brand, not to publish. If that one job matches how your business actually works, it is enough — and a bigger site will buy you nothing but a bill.

This article is about where that line runs, and about the five things that have to be there before anything else is considered.

What most company websites are actually for

Before the checklist, one distinction that decides everything after it: most company websites exist to be checked, not to be paid through.

We are not going to put a national percentage on that. The comparable European figures come from a survey Switzerland is not part of, and we did not reach a Swiss statistical source at first hand — so the honest version is the mechanism rather than a number borrowed from another market.

The mechanism holds anywhere. Across every market where this has been measured, the share of firms that have a website is several times the share that sells through one. The gap between those two is where the brochure site lives, and it is large because most business-to-business and most local service selling still happens in conversation. A site serving that kind of business is doing something narrower and more useful than a shop: it is making the firm checkable.

Two consequences follow, and both cut against the usual advice.

Being checkable is most of the value. Someone has heard your name, from a neighbour or a supplier, and wants to know within thirty seconds whether you are real, what you do and how to reach you. A site that answers that has done its job, whatever else it lacks.

"Everyone has one" is usually false for small firms. Wherever the split by size has been measured, large companies are near-universal and small ones are not. If your competitors are small local suppliers, having a site is more of a differentiator in your market than the phrase suggests — and not having one is more common than you would guess from looking at bigger firms.

What a brochure site is, and what it is not

It is a page or a handful of pages that answer four questions: who you are, what you do, for whom, and how to reach you. It has to load on a phone, prove you are real, and make contact take one tap.

It is not a smaller version of a big site. That framing is what produces brochure sites with eleven pages, a blog nobody writes and a login area nobody uses. A brochure site is not an early stage of something — it is a complete answer to a particular situation, and firms stay in that situation for years.

It is not a substitute for a shop, either. The moment you want to take an order and a payment, you have moved to a different category of project, with different running costs and different obligations.

One variant causes confusion and is worth naming: a brochure site can be a single page, with the sections stacked one under another, and that is still a brochure site rather than a landing page. The difference is not the page count but the job — a one-page brochure site answers all four questions for everyone who arrives, while a landing page narrows to one action for one campaign and deliberately gives no way out. Building the second when you needed the first leaves you with a site you cannot send anyone to except through an ad.

What has to be on it

What you do and for whom. On the first screen, in a sentence a competitor could not also write. "We provide comprehensive solutions" is a sentence every competitor could write, which is why it says nothing.

Proof that you exist. Photographs of actual work, an address, a name. Stock photography of an office that is not yours does the opposite of what it is there for.

A price or a range. Or a plain statement of what it depends on and why there is none. A visitor who finds no cost information mostly leaves rather than asks.

Contact in one tap. A tappable number on a phone and a form with two fields. Every extra field reduces the number of forms sent.

Company details and legal notices. Registration details in whatever form your market requires, a privacy policy, and cookie information if anything on the page sets them. This is the one item on the list that is not a matter of judgement.

What can usually wait

A blog nobody will keep up. Multiple languages "for later". A customer login area. Entry animations. A newsletter with nothing to send. A sprawling gallery instead of three good photographs.

None of these is wrong in itself. Each is wrong before the five above are done, because each costs build time and upkeep and none of them changes whether somebody calls you.

How many pages, and which

The honest criterion is not a number — it is your own conversations. Count the questions that come up more than three times a month. That is your page list.

For most brochure sites it comes to between one and five pages: a home page that answers all four questions, a page per service where services differ enough that people ask about them separately, and a contact page. Anything beyond that is usually structure copied from a bigger firm's site rather than from your own calls.

The most common error here is dividing the site by how the company is organised — departments, teams, history. A customer does not know how you are organised and is not looking along your structure.

The home page is worth treating as its own problem, because on a brochure site most visitors never leave it. In the first screen it has to carry the sentence about what you do and for whom, and a way to make contact. Below that, in this order: proof, scope, price or range, and the contact point again. Anything that pushes the first of those below the fold — a full-width photograph with no text, an animated introduction, a cookie banner covering half the screen on a phone — is costing you the only thing the page is for.

An "About us" page deserves a particular warning. It is the page most often written first and least often read, and on a brochure site it usually belongs as three sentences on the home page rather than as a destination of its own.

When a brochure site is enough

Three conditions. If all three hold, a bigger site buys you nothing but a bill.

You sell in conversation, not on the site. The client calls or writes, the quote is individual, and the decision happens in contact with a person. The site's job is to lead to that conversation and make you credible on the way.

The offer fits on one screen. One service, or a few closely related ones. With five services that people ask about separately, a brochure site starts getting in the way — each of them deserves its own address and its own answer.

Traffic comes from referral and local search. Somebody heard about you and is checking whether you are real. The site works as confirmation rather than as an acquisition channel — and a handful of pages is plenty. With that kind of traffic, a well-kept Google business profile usually does more than expanding the site.

When it stops being enough

The signals are specific, and none of them is "the site looks dated".

• You answer the same questions over and over. If every conversation involves explaining the same thing, that is a page — and a page answers for you while you sleep.
• People ask for things that are not on the site. Prices, lead times, whether you cover their trade. Every such question is a cost on both sides.
• You start paying for traffic. A campaign pointed at a brochure site wastes part of the budget, because the page answers everyone at once and nobody precisely. What you need then is a landing page, not a bigger brochure site.
• You want the site to accept something. An order, a booking, a service request. That is the moment you cross from being checked to being transacted with, and it is a different investment.
• You are hiring. Publishing vacancies is one of the few reasons a brochure site grows for a practical rather than a sales reason.

Notice what is not on that list: "a competitor has a prettier one" and "three years have passed". Neither is a reason. A site that delivers enquiries does not need rebuilding because it looks its age — and a rebuild undertaken for that reason usually produces a site that is equally handsome and equally ineffective, because nobody changed what was actually deciding the outcome.

A brochure site and a social profile

These are not alternatives, and the choice between them is the wrong question. A profile reaches people who are not searching; a site answers people who are. What differs is ownership: a profile is rented, with reach, terms and access all in someone else's hands.

The sensible arrangement is both, with the profile pointing at the site rather than at private messages — because a conversation in a rented inbox is the only record of a customer you will have if the account goes.

There is a practical test for firms wondering whether the profile alone will do. Ask what happens if somebody wants to check you at eight in the morning without an account on that platform, from a work computer where it is blocked. If the answer is "they find nothing", the profile is not doing the job the site would do — being publicly checkable is most of the value here, and a walled channel cannot provide it.

The reverse is also true and worth admitting: for some trades, especially visual ones, a profile genuinely does more work than a site, and the site exists as the place the profile points at rather than the other way round. That is a smaller site than most people expect, and building it larger does not change the split.

The address, and what has to be yours

Three things have to be registered in your name, not the contractor's: the domain, access to wherever the site is hosted, and the accounts in any analytics tools.

The domain matters most, because losing it is the only irreversible item on the list. Checking costs nothing and takes a minute — registrant details are public. Do it before the site is built, not when you are changing contractors.

The second and third matter later and in the same way: when you part company, a site you cannot get into is a site you have to rebuild.

What it costs — in work, not in money

We give no figures here; they are kept in the cost section, where they are maintained. What is worth knowing is which part of the cost is yours and cannot be bought:

• The text. What you do, for whom, and what it costs. A contractor can edit it; they cannot invent it.
• The photographs. Three good ones of real work beat thirty stock images, and only you can take them.
• The decisions. What you sell, to whom, and what you do not do. This is the item that stalls projects, because it turns out not to have been settled.

How long it takes

A brochure site is days of build time and, usually, weeks of waiting for the three things above. That ratio is the single most useful thing to know before commissioning one: the project will not be waiting on the contractor.

The cheapest thing you can do before it starts is write the content in a plain document, with no concern for style.

Two other things affect the timeline and both are worth settling before signing. One person who approves. Three people approving a layout means three rounds of revisions and a month nobody planned for. And what happens to the old address, if there was an earlier site — pages that changed address without a redirect are a defect you do not see for months, because nothing appears broken.

Five mistakes we see most often

• No price and no explanation of why there is none. Silence reads as "expensive".
• A contact form with eight fields on a site whose only job is to produce contact.
• A phone number that is not tappable on a phone, which is where most of the traffic is.
• Stock photography instead of the work. It undermines exactly the thing the site exists to establish.
• Nobody looking at it after launch. An out-of-date offer costs more than no site at all, because it damages credibility instead of building it.

The pattern behind four of those five is the same: each was a decision taken to avoid a smaller, more uncomfortable decision. No price, because agreeing one internally is harder than leaving it out. Stock photography, because arranging real photographs takes an afternoon. Eight form fields, because someone wanted the enquiry pre-qualified rather than answered. The site ends up carrying the cost of every conversation the business did not have with itself.

How to tell whether it works

Three checks, all free.

Ask how people found you. One question in the first call. "From a referral, but I checked the site first" means the site did not bring the contact — it saved it, and that counts.

Count the calls that stopped. Fewer questions about price after launch means the page took over the work it was meant to.

Open it on your own phone, on mobile data, and send yourself an enquiry. Most defects surface in three minutes, and they are defects nobody will report, because the person who hits them closes the tab.

Search for your own company name. Not the service, the name — that is what someone checking you after a referral will type. If the site is not the first result for it, either it is too new to be indexed or something is blocking indexing, and both are worth knowing in the first month rather than the sixth.

The shortest summary: a brochure site is finished when those five things are on it and someone can reach you in one tap. Everything beyond that point is a choice, and most of the choices commonly made at that point cost upkeep without changing whether anybody calls.

What this article deliberately leaves out

• Which type of site you need at all — that decision comes before this one.
• Whether a site pays for itself — the arithmetic is in why your business needs a website.
• Amounts — cost.
• How to bring traffic — marketing and SEO.