Most small business websites are built to be looked at. The useful ones are built to be found, read and quoted, by people and increasingly by the machines answering on their behalf.
A site that nobody finds fails silently. There is no error, no complaint and no bounce rate anybody reads. It simply sits there, costing a hosting fee, while the enquiries go to whoever came up first. The usual causes are dull: pages that say nothing specific, a design that loads slowly on a phone, and markup that gives a search engine nothing to work with.
The newer cause is less dull. A growing share of people never reach a website at all. They ask an assistant, read the answer, and act on it. If your pages cannot be read without running code, you are not in that answer.
Written first. The pages are drafted around the questions your buyers actually ask and the words they use when they ask them. Design follows the writing, not the other way round.
Fast on a phone. Most of your visitors are on one, often on mobile data, often in a hurry. A site that takes four seconds to show anything has already lost a share of them.
Readable without JavaScript. Search crawlers mostly cope. The answer engines largely do not: they read the first response and leave. Your pages ship their text in that first response, with structured data describing the business around it.
Yours to run. You get the code, the accounts and a person inside your business who can change a page. No licence, no retainer required, nothing that breaks when we stop talking.
No. If the current site earns its keep, the better job is usually to fix what is costing you rather than rebuild. We say so when that is the answer. When a rebuild is the right call, we tell you what it buys and what it does not.
You do, and that is not a formality. The code, the domain, the analytics and the content are yours, with a named person inside your business able to change a page without calling us. There is no licence to keep paying and nothing that stops working if you stop working with us.
That a machine reading the page without running any code still understands what you sell, who you are and how to reach you. In practice: real text in the markup, structured data describing the business, one clear address per page, and a file telling answer engines what the site is about. We did it to our own site first.
Contact info@sixthsenselabs.com.au to book a signal audit.