Web design in Adamstown, NSW: the best site on Brunker Road is the one still true in two years.

Most Adamstown businesses need four things on a website and are regularly sold fourteen. The extra ten are what stops it being maintained, and an unmaintained site is worse than a plain one.

The four are what you do in the words a customer uses, where you are and how to get in, when you are open, and how to reach a person. Everything beyond that is optional and has to earn its keep.

This is not an argument for cheapness. It is an argument against pages nobody will ever update. A blog with three posts from 2023, a team page listing somebody who left, an events section with nothing in it - each one quietly tells a visitor the business is coasting.

The honest test for any extra page is whether you will still be updating it in a year. If the answer is no, it will damage the site rather than help it, and it should not be built.

Adamstown traffic is overwhelmingly local. People from the surrounding streets, from Kotara and Broadmeadow, and people passing along Brunker Road. Very little of it comes from across the city.

A local visitor needs almost no persuading that the suburb is convenient, so the site's job moves entirely onto whether you are the right business and whether you are open.

What that rewards is being unusually specific about what you do and do not do. In a small strip the businesses that struggle are usually the ones describing themselves in categories rather than in services a person would actually search for.

It also rewards being findable at the moment of need. Half of these decisions are made within a kilometre of your door, which means the site and the Google listing have to agree with each other exactly.

What a Brunker Road site actually needs

• The service named the way a customer says it.

  Not the industry term, and not a category.

• Hours you keep, including Saturday.

  The most common wrong fact on a small strip site.

• Where to park, in one line.

  The strip and the side streets are not the same experience.

• A number that dials in one tap.

  Most of this traffic ends in a call, not a form.

Thousands of people pass through Adamstown who have never stopped. A website is one of the few things that turns a business somebody drives past into a business somebody plans to visit.

The way that actually works is unglamorous: appearing in the search somebody does at home for the thing you sell, then giving them a reason that the drive is worth it rather than the equivalent in their own suburb.

The reason has to be real. A speciality, a brand nobody else stocks, a service the nearer competitor does not offer, an appointment available when everybody else is full. Convenience will never be your argument.

This is where most small strip sites give up. They describe the business accurately and never once say why somebody would choose it, so the visitor defaults to whatever is closest to them.

Four things, and get the answers in writing. Who the domain belongs to, who can log into the hosting, what an edit costs after launch, and who carries the site a year and a half from now.

On a strip of small businesses the access question goes wrong more than anywhere. Sites get built by a relative, a departed employee or a company that has since closed, and the passwords leave with them.

You tend to find out at the worst possible moment - a change of hours, a new phone number, or a renewal notice for a domain nobody can reach. None of it is urgent until suddenly it is.

The rest is plain sense. Know the price of an edit, know who is accountable, and be wary of any quote where nobody asked what your customers actually type before pricing the design.

The four questions

• Is the domain in the business's name?

  On a small business this is the detail most often quietly wrong.

• Do you hold the hosting login yourself?

  Not a relative, not a former employee. You.

• What does an edit cost after launch?

  A figure and a turnaround, not goodwill.

• Whose job is the site a year and a half from now?

  If nobody has said, nobody has thought about it.