The Order You Should Actually Build Your Business Website In

Every business website exists to help a visitor do something.

• Call you.
• Book a service.
• Buy a product.
• Fill out a form.
• Send an inquiry.

The problem starts when we try to make every one of those actions equally important.

A phone number here. A Shop Now button there. A booking link in the menu. A contact form buried at the bottom. Five different directions competing for the same visitor.

Instead, decide on your primary action.

That doesn't mean your website can't offer other options. It means there's one action the site is intentionally designed to make especially clear and easy.

Once you know what that action is, decisions about your homepage, navigation, page structure and calls to action become a whole lot easier.

Now you can start thinking about pages.

Not:

“What pages are websites supposed to have?”

But:

“What does someone need to see, understand or trust before they'll take that action?”

That's a much better question.

Depending on your business, that could mean a homepage that quickly explains what you do, an About page that builds trust, Services or Products pages that explain what someone can actually get, a Contact or Booking page that makes taking action easy, and FAQs that answer common questions before they become reasons to leave.

You don't need pages just for the sake of having pages.

A focused site with five clear pages can be far easier for visitors to understand than a sprawling ten-page site where nothing has a clear job.

Every page should have a reason to exist.

Now we can talk about website builders.

Wix. Squarespace. Shopify. WordPress. Or something else entirely.

There isn't one platform that's automatically right for every small business.

And that's precisely why choosing one before you know what you're building is backwards.

Once you understand what your website needs to accomplish and what it needs to contain, choosing the technology becomes a much smaller decision.

You're no longer asking:

“Which website builder is best?”

You're asking:

“Which option best supports the website my business actually needs?”

That's a very different question.

Platform choice comes after the plan. Not before.

Website builders are very good at giving you things to put on a website.

Templates. Sections. Galleries. Buttons. Forms. Pages. Apps.

What they can't decide for you is why those things belong there.

That's where DIY website projects often become overwhelming.

You're trying to make design decisions, write copy, choose pages, configure technology and figure out your customer journey at the same time.

Start with the business decisions first and the website becomes much easier to build around them.

You're no longer filling a template.

You're building a website with a job to do.

This is where the real build begins.

You still need to map the site, choose the right tools, figure out what belongs on each page, write the copy, organize your calls to action, build everything and make sure it's actually ready to launch.

And that's more than I'm going to cram into one blog post.

Because knowing what order to work in is one thing.

Having the actual process for doing it is another.

The DIY Website Blueprint is the start-to-finish system I created for small business owners who want to build their own website without piecing the entire process together from random tutorials and half-finished templates.

It takes you from planning through building and launch, with the tools and guidance to make the decisions along the way.

DIY Website Blueprint — $79 CAD