What a small business website needs in 2026

Prices before the first call

Start with prices. Packages, a price list or a calculator: any of them lets a visitor know what to expect before writing to you.

We pitched a new site to an accounting and audit firm in Tbilisi. The site it had did not name a single price, so a visitor looking for a ballpark figure found nothing to go on. The firm decided against a new site in the end, so ours stayed a concept.

In the concept, four packages carry prices. A calculator takes six inputs (legal form, VAT, staff, monthly transactions, foreign trade and registration), recommends a package and estimates the monthly fee. One button then carries those inputs and the total into the request form. All prices and surcharges are kept in one place, so changing a price takes a single edit.

You don’t need a calculator to show a price. The lounge bar’s menu is four cards with prices, and in the owner’s words, “Now people check the menu before they come, not at the table.” The car wash brand’s size picker shows the price of each jug next to its volume, weight and number of washes.

Messengers next to the form

We put Telegram and WhatsApp right where people decide to get in touch, next to the form, not instead of it. The accounting firm’s old site had no messenger contact at all.

The form itself can deliver to Telegram. On the parking equipment installer’s site it asks for a name, a contact and consent, and the request goes straight to the owner’s Telegram. On the online course page everyone who handles applications gets each one in Telegram. The course author put it this way: “I filled the first cohort from the site, with no ads.”

A page for each language

If your clients read different languages, give each language its own pages. The accounting firm concept works in English, Georgian and Russian. A firm like that in Georgia works for foreign founders as well as local companies, and the old site had no Russian version.

Every language gets the whole text of the site, sums are written the way each language writes them, and Georgian headings get their own size and spacing. A separate article, linked at the end, shows how that works.

Light pages for a phone

The lounge bar case starts from a simple observation: guests pick where to spend the evening on their phone. So we keep pages light and quick to open. On the lounge bar site a full-height picture of a hookah moves as you scroll, and the page still scrolls smoothly on a phone.

Small decisions count as well. On the same site photos are saved in a lighter format, the gallery and the map load only when a guest scrolls down to them, and visitors who turn on reduced motion in their phone settings get the page without its animations. On the car wash site the dilution tables fold into cards on phones, so “1:80” never shows up as a bare number. On phones the accounting firm concept adds a bar with its two main actions.

SEO starts in the same place: fast pages, a clear structure and texts written for search from launch day.

The pages you can skip

Before calling an installer, a property manager wants three answers: what exactly do you install, have you done a job like mine, how soon can you come. A good site answers all three before the phone rings. The installer’s site does it on one page, in the order a customer thinks, and three more of the five sites here are a single page too.

Skip the sections nobody will keep up. A news feed that stopped in 2017 and empty sections did the accounting firm’s old site no favours.

Add a page when a second kind of buyer needs one. The car wash brand sells one product to drivers, who want to know which jug to buy and how to use it, and to car wash owners, who want the cost of a single wash. Each lands on a page written for them.

What a site like this costs

A website starts from $250 and takes from 1 week. The price moves with:

• how many pages and languages;
• calculators, catalogs and other interactive parts;
• an admin panel for editing;
• texts, photos and translation;
• integrations: CRM, bookings, payments.

An admin panel pays off if you update things yourself: the design studio site has one that runs its portfolio and its blog. Sometimes a rule is enough. The online course’s start date changed twice a month and appeared in six places on the page. Now it updates itself: before the 15th the next cohort starts on the 15th, after that on the last day of the month.

Facts about your business have to come from you. In the car wash prototype we did not guess: 42 figures and details stayed marked in red for the product owner to supply.

Before the build there is a short call, then a written scope with a fixed price, and you click through a working version before the bulk of the work starts. A small site can move fast: the core of the parking installer’s site was built in a single morning.

Questions

Alexander ZabrodinCEO · Founder

ZabSoft is a software company in Batumi. The person who scopes your project is the person who builds it.