Why Simple Websites for Business

Why build your website with us?

The longer version is that most small business owners in Australia get offered one of three deals, and none of them fit a business that needs a phone number, a list of services and some photos of good work.

The agency build. A five-to-ten page small business site from an Australian agency is commonly quoted at $3,000 to $10,000 in 2026, usually with a maintenance plan at $150 a month or more on top. You get a custom design, a project manager and a few meetings. You also pay for the studio, the sales team and the account manager. That's where most of the money goes.

The subscription site. $150 a month, forever. It feels cheap until you add it up: $1,800 a year, $9,000 over five years, and if you stop paying the site disappears. You never own it. The design, the domain and sometimes your own photos sit on someone else's platform.

The DIY weekend. Wix on a Saturday. It works for some people. For most tradies it ends up 70 per cent finished, with stock photos of someone else's van, and never quite gets published. Your time is worth more on the tools.

We sit outside all three. Fixed price, fixed scope, fixed timeline. Five pages written for your trade and your area, with your photos, on hosting that costs you nothing. The site lives on your own Cloudflare account, in your name. We're added as an admin so we can make edits, and you can remove us whenever you like. If we closed tomorrow, your website would keep running exactly as it is.

You can see what you'd be getting before you spend anything: there are six working example sites at /examples/, one each for a plumber, electrician, landscaper, cleaner, cafe and mobile mechanic.

Why does a small business actually need a website?

A small business needs a website because people check before they call. Word of mouth still brings the lead, but the lead then looks you up, and what they find decides whether they ring you or the next name on the list.

Here's how it plays out in practice for a trade or service business:

Someone searches your business name. A neighbour recommends you. The customer types your name into Google that night. If the result is a Facebook page last updated in 2023 and a directory listing with the wrong number, you've lost some of the trust the recommendation gave you. If it's a clean site with your photos, your services and a tap-to-call button, you've kept it.

They look for the basics. In BrightLocal's 2026 survey of US consumers, 85 per cent said contact details and opening hours were an important factor when researching a local business. That's the whole job of a small business website: prove you're real, show what you do, make it easy to get in touch. A Google Business Profile helps, but it doesn't give you a page to send people to or a place to show your work.

They ask an AI. This is new, and it's moving fast. The same survey found 45 per cent of US consumers had asked an AI tool such as ChatGPT or Google's AI Mode for a local business recommendation in the past year, up from 6 per cent the year before. Those tools build their answers from what's published on the web. A business with no site, or one that hides its trade and service area behind a slideshow, is hard for them to recommend. A plain page that says "gas fitter, northern Gold Coast, licensed, call this number" is easy.

You need somewhere to send people. Instead of reading your services list over the phone at 6pm, you text a link. Instead of describing the retaining wall you built last month, you point at the Projects page. None of this needs a big site. It needs a fast one, with the right five pages, that says what you do and where you do it in plain words.

Why is it only $990?

It's $990 because we've removed the four things that make websites expensive, not because we've cut corners on the site itself.

No agency overhead. Simple Websites for Business is a small operation, not a studio. There's no account manager, no sales team and no office lease built into the price.

A proven template, adapted per trade, not a blank canvas. Custom design from scratch is the single biggest cost in a web build, and for a plumber or a cleaner it adds nothing a customer can see. Every site we build starts from a structure we already know works on a phone: what goes above the fold, where the call button sits, how the services page is laid out. We adapt it to your trade, your area, your photos and your words. The design work was done once, properly, so you don't pay for it again.

Hosting that costs nothing. Your site is hosted on Cloudflare's free tier, on your own account. Cloudflare serves static sites like yours at no charge, with no bandwidth bill and no renewal. The only recurring cost is the domain name, which renews on your own card for about $15 a year. Most "cheap" website deals hide their margin in hosting. We don't host you at all.

A deliberately narrow scope. Five pages. No shop, no booking system, no blog, no email hosting. Each of those adds design time, plugins, security patches and support calls, and each one pushes a site from a one-off cost to an ongoing bill. By not doing them, we can build the five pages a working business needs, do them well, and charge once.

That's what gets a proper site to $990. It's not the cheap version of an agency site. It's the same result with the expensive parts left out.

What's included in the $990?

Everything a working small business website needs, built for you, not by you.

You get five pages: Home, About, Services, Projects and Contact. The copy is written for your specific trade and service area, using the way you actually describe the work, so the site reads like you rather than like a template. Your own photos and your own logo go in. We don't use stock images, because a customer can tell, and a real photo of your ute outside a real job is worth more than a stranger's.

Every page has tap-to-call and tap-to-text, because most of your visitors are on a phone and most of them want to reach you, not read. There's a quote form that lands in your inbox. The site loads in under a second on a mobile connection, and it's set up so Google and AI search engines can find your business, read what you do and know where you do it.

It's hosted on your own free Cloudflare account, which you own outright, and it's live in seven business days. The first 30 days of small edits after launch are free. If you don't have a domain, we'll register one for $90 plus the cost of the name. If you don't have a logo, we're doing a simple one at no charge for our first ten clients.

What's not included, and why

We don't do email hosting, online booking, online shops or blogs. That's a boundary we've chosen, not a gap we're hoping you won't notice.

Each of those is a different product with its own ongoing needs. Email hosting means mailboxes, spam filtering and support when something bounces. Online booking means calendar syncing, payment gateways and no-show rules. An online shop means inventory, shipping, tax and card security. A blog only pays off if someone writes for it every month, and most tradies won't, which leaves a "Latest news" page from 2024 doing more harm than good. Bolting any of them onto a $990 site would either make it a $3,000 site or a worse one. The businesses we build for need a phone call or a quote request, and the five-page site is built to produce exactly that.

If you do need one of those things, we'll tell you up front rather than take your money and deliver a compromise. For email, Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 on your domain. For bookings, a dedicated booking or job-management tool. For a shop, Shopify. Your site can link out to all of them, and the domain is yours, so nothing we build gets in the way.