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Join for freePosted: Thu 29th Oct 2026
Your website should do more than just look good – it should help your business get found and attract customers.
In this practical online session led by Aggie Dymarska, learn how to build an effective small business website, create a clear online presence and improve your visibility in local search so nearby customers can find you.
The essential elements of an effective small-business website, including clear structure, navigation and engaging content
How to create compelling calls to action that encourage visitors to take the next step
How to improve your local search visibility using SEO and Google Business Profile
Aggie Dymarska is a web designer and marketing consultant at Branderbee, specialising in helping service-based businesses build an effective online presence and attract clients.
With a background in UX design, she helps businesses create websites and marketing strategies that support sustainable growth.
This webinar is part of a series for business.connected. Check out the other events, including more online workshops and business bootcamps held in person across different regions of the UK.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Karla: Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I can see people are joining now, so welcome to today’s business.connected online workshop. I’m Karla Freyre, product manager at Enterprise Nation, and I’m delighted to have you with us.
Today’s session is part of business.connected, our programme in partnership with Vodafone Business, created to help small businesses go digital and adopt new technology. On the business.connected hub, you’ll find free access to more events like this one, e-learning courses and expert content, all designed to support your digital journey. I’ll be putting the link to the hub in the chat as well.
We’re really excited to have you here for this practical session, which will explore the essential elements of an effective small business website. You’ll also learn how to improve your website’s visibility to help nearby customers find your business.
This is a two-hour interactive workshop with a short break. These sessions are designed to be engaging and practical, so please be present, take notes, get involved and drop your questions or thoughts into the chat at any time. Our goal is for you to leave today not just feeling inspired, but actually equipped to take action and get started straight away.
As part of this session, we’re keen to understand the impact so we can continue to support entrepreneurs like you on your journey. I’ll be sharing a quick poll at the start and at the end of the session, and we’d really appreciate it if you could complete them, as they’ll help us shape and improve future workshops.
I’ll launch the first poll now, so please start completing it while I welcome our speaker for today. Thank you so much, everyone.
Aggie Dymarska: Hi, everyone. I can see the poll has been launched, so it’s important that you answer all the questions Enterprise Nation has prepared. I can’t vote, and you’re partly rating the value of this session, so I hope I can deliver.
While you’re answering the questions, I’ll share my screen so you can see the presentation that supports what I’ll be talking about today. We’re using Zoom, which is very nice because it lets me share the presentation as a file, so let’s see how that works.
This is “Building a website that works”. Zoom is telling me we’re in presentation mode, but the most important thing today is that you’re not sat here bored – we want to engage, so I’d love for you to use the chat box.
And I can see you are. Jenny, Sam, welcome, and welcome to everyone else who’s joining and still answering the poll. I know you’re keen to learn about building a website that works, and this is exactly what we’ll be going through today.
The session will be divided into two parts. The first part will be more theory, so you can learn about building a website that works, and in the second part we’ll put it into practice, so it’s going to be very engaging. Zina, we’ve got you in the room – I’m loving the chat box.
You might know a little bit about me already. My name is Aggie, and I’ve been building websites for over 15 years now, so it’s been quite a journey. I’m here today to help you with your website, or perhaps if you’re learning to build websites for other people.
I tend to talk quite quickly, and we have a lot to cover, so if I’m going too fast, please let me know. If you have any questions, we can answer them throughout and at the end of the second session, and Enterprise Nation will be helping us moderate the chat at the end of the second hour.
If you’d like to connect with me, the Enterprise Nation network is the place, but I’m quite prominent on LinkedIn, where I post about web design, marketing and startups, so I’d love for you to connect with me there. Being a website person, let’s call it, I’m obviously easy to find online.
First things first: what is this first hour about? It’s about building a website that works – how to make it work for you and for your customers, whether you’re a product-based or service-based business.
We all want to show up in searches, so we’ll talk a little bit about SEO, Google Business Profile and LLMs. AI is really hot right now, and I’m sure you have some questions about how it might affect you being found. There’s also a small segment on the security of your website, which is also important to take into consideration.
I know everybody loves a good takeaway, so here are the takeaways from this session. We’re hoping that after 40 or 45 minutes today, you’ll know what it takes to build a website that succeeds, and the features and tools you might use to build it. There’s the AI segment, which I think will be quite exciting for you, and we’ll also be talking about ranking in searches and security.
As I mentioned, I can see you’re using the chat, so I want to make the most of that. Please type “service” if yours is a service-based business – so we’re talking consultants, hairdressers, anybody who takes bookings.
One, two – we’ve got Sam, we’ve got Dominique, quite a few service-based businesses. We have some links as well, Jenny – thank you very much for sharing, and I might have a look later.
It’s only fair that we also ask about product-based businesses, so let us know if you’re selling products or building an online store. A digital product is a little bit in between service and product.
I’m covering both sides. I specialise in service-based business websites, but I’ve built – and failed to build – quite a few online stores, so I’ll be telling you about those as well.
Coaching, services... You’ve done a great job joining the bootcamp, because it will benefit people who want to learn not only how to build a website, but how it works and what happens after you build it.
Here are the essential components – it’s the checklist we’re going to be using, and you’re more than welcome to take a screenshot. I might not share the full presentation to download, but if you have any questions about specific slides, you can get in touch with me or with Enterprise Nation.
This slide is very useful because it breaks down the essential components of a website that works. There are clearly defined goals, which I’ll go into in a minute, a list of features, preparing your content, deciding on the look of the website, and the additional steps you have to take to actually launch a website that works.
You might notice there’s very little design and development on this list, because it’s much more important to prepare everything than to actually go and build it. I know a lot of us will be tempted to jump into Squarespace, Wix or another platform and just start the website, but it’s not recommended. What’s recommended is to check off this list first.
So what is the number one priority for a website that works? I’d love to hear from you – what do you think is the priority for a good website?
To sell, speed – somebody’s saying speed. Conversion – very good ideas here. Conversion means turning the visitor into a paying client or customer.
Actually, I believe the number one priority for a website that works is meeting user goals. A lot of people think the user is the customer, but you’re also a user of your own website.
If you’re building an online store, for example, you have to manage it – you have to take orders and deal with them. So for your website to work, it also needs to take care of your needs and goals as a user.
You have to stop thinking that people will visit your website and start thinking about why they would. Give them a good reason to visit. Once you have the website, you’ll start marketing it, so you have to have something good on there to draw people in.
User journeys – thinking about people and how they travel through your website – and building trust are all very, very important. But most important is to work out what people actually want to achieve on your website.
We all have a vague idea of why people visit websites in general, but we want to really know what the common user goals are for all websites – and then, of course, why people would visit your website specifically. Maybe some of you have thought about that already, and maybe it feels obvious, but it’s really very important to actually think about it.
Here are some common user goals – on the left for service-based businesses, and on the right for product-based businesses. Why do people visit websites? They want to see your past work and what you’ve done to date.
For service-based businesses, they want to check the services on offer – what do you actually do? They might want to read some testimonials and reviews to feel reassured that you can deliver the results you promise, and of course book a call or contact you directly.
People also like to check the price. A lot of people ask me whether they should show their prices on their website, and the simple answer is that you maybe shouldn’t show the price of each service, but you need to indicate which end of the market you’re positioning yourself at.
What I mean is that if I go to a consultant’s website and see that they offer a paid call at £29.99, I already know that a call costing around £30 is affordable. But if I see that the first call costs £500, I know this is a high-end offer. So I wouldn’t say I’m going to design a website for you for £2,000, £5,000 or £10,000, but I will indicate on my website where I’m positioned as an expert.
With product-based businesses, pricing is less of an issue because you have to price your products anyway, so people will see that price straight away. But it’s a good idea to show a bracket or a starting point so people can gauge where you are within the market.
Common user goals for product-based businesses include gaining more knowledge about the product they’re interested in. When they click a link to a specific product, they don’t want to be taken to a catalogue – they want to be taken to that particular product.
Checking reviews is very important. I like Trustpilot for that, but there’s other software that can do this, and Google reviews are very good. People also want to browse your range, so it’s important to have a nicely organised catalogue.
Then there’s something a lot of store owners don’t prioritise: completing a return. We’ve all bought something we didn’t like or that arrived broken and wanted to send it back.
If you go to a website and can’t do that simple thing, you already know you’re never coming back to that store. So it’s very important to take care of the returns side of things.
We’re being reminded to complete the survey, so if you can, please do. This is being recorded, so if you feel like you’re missing out on something, don’t fear – Enterprise Nation has got your back.
So these are the common user goals for product and service businesses, and you might recognise some of your own within those lists. We have user goals, but your business is really the reason you’re building this website, so it has its own goals too.
Business is business – it’s about making money at the end of the day. So you must identify how your website is helping you make money; it’s as simple as that. In general, there are two ways a website can impact your revenue, or the bottom line as we call it, and I’ll go through them now.
The first way is indirectly, through enhancing your credibility, as someone already mentioned in the chat – building trust by looking professional. It can also attract high-calibre clients or customers, because it works so well, it’s on brand, and it represents you and your offer so well that you can actually charge more.
That’s the indirect impact on revenue, and this is what directly impacts it. The number of sales you process through the website is obviously what we want to be seeing, and if you’re a service-based business, maybe the number of emails you capture is important.
Or maybe you go straight for the sale and want people to book calls with you. If those calls are booked, it directly impacts your revenue because you have more opportunity to sell your services.
So there’s not much to choose from, but your website should take into consideration how it affects your revenue. Are you selling something through the website directly, or are you enhancing your credibility?
How is this going to help you make money? There’s no point investing in a website that doesn’t pay for itself, so you have to weigh it up and aim to help your bank account with your website.
So we have user goals and business goals, and those translate into website goals. These are other goals you might want to consider: attracting people through SEO, capturing details, as we’ve already mentioned, generating leads and bookings, selling products and gathering feedback.
Gathering feedback is an overlooked goal for a business, but it’s very useful to include a little survey on your website – you can see one on my website, websiteisnotenough.com. Within that survey, it’s important to ask users what their goal was in visiting your website.
If you’re lucky enough that people answer it, you might find they visit for reasons you didn’t even think of. Then you can act on it and make sure they can complete that goal in future, if they can’t already.
So we can connect the business and website goals. If you want to capture details, you have to do it somehow, so you might decide to promote a newsletter or a lead magnet – a document or piece of advice people really want and are willing to submit their email address in return for.
If you want people to book calls, maybe you advertise that intro call as an amazing offer – an amazing half an hour with an expert. It’s really important to talk about the call you’re offering and its benefits.
You might want to promote an event or webinar – those are the things that will generally generate leads on the website. If you want to sell products, advertise the spring collection and come up with a campaign with some marketing behind it.
What I’m trying to say is that it won’t happen on its own, so when you’re thinking about your website, think about promoting it too – you have to tell people about it so they’ll visit and check it out. Are you going to launch an Easter promo or advertise a specific service? Think about it.
Then there’s gathering feedback, which I touched on. You may want to launch your website with a survey – I like to use something called Hotjar, or you could use Typeform to create a little pop-up survey with a couple of questions.
The first important question is: what was your goal in visiting this website? Then the person can tell you in their own words.
So we’ve connected business goals with website goals, but how do we know we’ve achieved them? You need to set up some metrics. It sounds scary, but it’s not that complicated – it’s very easy.
If you’re promoting a newsletter, check on a monthly basis how many people signed up and how many downloaded your resources or lead magnet. When it comes to intro calls, how many were booked this month? What did you do to promote that call? Is it working, and is it better than last month?
When selling products, look at how many you sold and how many people visited a particular product page. You can check that in Google Analytics, and if you use Shopify or another platform, it will often show the number of visitors.
You can compare how many visited with how many bought, because in theory those visitors are interested – so are they buying? And with feedback, how many people completed your survey, how did they score your website, and did they achieve the goal they had in mind when visiting?
We’re going at a quick pace, but I hope you can see why it’s important to think about why people will visit your website and how that supports your business. What is this website going to do, and how is it going to convert visitors into either a captured lead or a sale?
And, of course, your website needs features that will help achieve those goals. It’s very easy to create a list of website features, and I like to think about it like looking for a rental in London.
I’ve rented many properties, and I always struggled to prioritise which ones to see. We know how it works – renting in London is a hard job.
So I always created a list of must-haves and nice-to-haves: the things I won’t compromise on and the things I can compromise on. A must-have for me was usually the location, because I like to travel to networking events and bootcamps like this one in person.
A nice-to-have was a balcony. Every time I had two properties in nice locations that didn’t have a balcony, I thought, “OK, I could live with it.” But if there was another property with a balcony, it ticked both of my boxes, so I’d go for that one.
Making that list helps you decide what you can compromise on and what you can’t. When it comes to your website, you’ll need to build it on a platform.
Some platforms include all the features, but they’ll be complex. Others won’t have all the features but will be easier to use and launch your website on, which is why that list of must-haves and nice-to-haves is important.
On the left, we have the must-haves for service-based businesses, and on the right, the must-haves for product sites – this is a list I’ve created. I see everything else as a nice-to-have, specifically for product sites or online stores.
A lot of entrepreneurs want to launch with multicurrency, and I’m telling you now, a multicurrency set-up is not only complex but will also cost you more. With Shopify or Squarespace, carrying out transactions in various currencies is a complex thing.
My advice is to launch in one currency. If you’re a local business serving the UK, let’s say, one currency is enough to start. Once you hit the ceiling and feel like you’re doing extremely well and could venture out to other countries or currencies, only then add it.
It’s an absolute nice-to-have, not a must-have, for a product site. Back to service-based businesses, and I’d expect everybody to know what responsive design means: your website works on both small and large screens.
It’s 2026, and people probably use websites on mobile more than on desktop, so your website needs to be responsive. You also have to come up with a clear call to action.
Maybe not for each page, but certainly for the whole website, you need to work out in very simple terms what you want people to do after they visit. That might go back to the goals – you want them to book a call, download something or use something of value on your website. A clear call to action tells people what you want them to do.
Great images and text are easy, and we’ll be talking about text and using AI for it a little later. It impacts SEO as well, so you have to make sure you have great images and text.
You also need enquiry forms so people can get in touch, or maybe even book a call with you straight away. You can use anything for call booking – Calendly, your own calendar or Squarespace’s own system – but you need to make it easy for people to book.
Then there’s an analytics tool, which works for both product- and service-based businesses. You have to have some understanding of how many people visited and maybe where they came from, and that’s specifically connected with spam.
If you’re a small or micro business and you see you’ve got 10,000 visitors a day, and you check, and they’re all from India, I’m afraid to say it’s probably bot traffic – fake traffic. That’s not good for your website, so you want to catch it when you can.
The only way to know is by looking at your analytics. Luckily, most platforms provide basic website analytics within the dashboard.
With WordPress, you might have to connect a little plugin and set it up initially with Google Analytics. It’s not difficult to do, but you have to take it into consideration alongside the other features of your website.
I’m just looking at a question about how to use the monthly website report to work out conversion. When you look at your monthly stats, you want to see how many people visited and how many bought, and you divide one by the other – that’s basically your conversion rate.
If 100 people visited a page and one person bought, that’s one conversion, and that’s actually not too bad. The average conversion rate on a website is two to 4%.
I know that’s not a great number, which is why we have to ensure enough interested people visit us. You can either increase the percentage of people who buy when they come, or bring in more people – same effect, more money in the bank.
Either way, it’s important to look at your analytics, and perhaps we’ll speak to Enterprise Nation about having a bootcamp on analytics itself. So that’s must-haves and nice-to-haves, and I’m going to speed up a little so we can cover ground.
For service-based business website platforms, I recommend WordPress with Elementor for those who really care about branding and being unique and bespoke. It gives you a lot of flexibility in how you design, but it’s complex, so that’s a challenge and you might need an expert to help.
Squarespace is a very good platform, and I like it for service-based businesses. It’s got a rigid layout system, so you won’t be as free when you design, but you can have the must-have features, and it also provides additional marketing tools within the same dashboard.
Systeme.io isn’t a website platform as such – it’s more of a landing page or funnel tool – but it’s definitely worth looking at. If you just need a simple landing page that will convert – say you’re launching an ebook you want to sell – Systeme.io might be the answer.
Then we have Framer. That’s for designers and developers who like to play with it, but it ends up quite expensive, so I’d warn you off it.
The difference between Squarespace and WordPress, for example, is that with WordPress, you pay for your hosting and you can host with anyone – I’m looking at 175 a year for decent hosting. Squarespace will charge you every month, and if you keep adding paid features, that bill is going to grow.
So you have to look at your list of must-have features and weigh up whether you’re going to be paying Squarespace a lot to include them. That’s for service-based businesses.
For product-based businesses, WordPress with WooCommerce is good for up to 100 products – beyond that, I’d definitely pick Shopify. There’s also a new player, Square Online, which gives you a point of sale too – the little tablet you take orders on.
It’s great for restaurants and for shops that physically sell something in store. Squarespace also works for product-based businesses to a degree, as does Wix, but they’re not that great, so Shopify is the best at the minute.
Somebody’s stuck between WordPress and Squarespace. Dominique, I’d say WordPress is good if you’re quite technical, because its dashboard isn’t very user-friendly. Squarespace is a lot easier to manage and understand for somebody who isn’t interested in learning a lot about their platform on YouTube.
Webflow is very basic. I know it’s the cheaper option, but I’d try not to use it. Lovable AI – oh, dearie me, here we go.
I used Lovable to build a website for a venture capital client, so you’d think it would be a high-end thing. Once you build it, it’s very difficult to change anything, because it keeps reshuffling and breaking things, and you keep paying for the tokens.
Honestly, I don’t see the need, especially for a smaller startup or something that needs to prove the concept. I’m not a fan of Lovable, and it can cost quite a lot if you keep using tokens, as you know AI does now.
Is WordPress good for a product-based website? It’s good for up to 100 products – I’d say if you’re selling a very unique, niche product with only a few variations. Otherwise, it gets tricky, and I have a bit about that later on in the presentation.
So let’s see where we are now: clearly defined goals and a list of features. Now we need to think about content and design.
It’s the fun part, I’d say, but it’s also the part we like to skip, because it’s fun when you have all the images and all the text, but producing them isn’t that easy. So let’s look at how to help ourselves.
First of all, before you get into the text, the designs and everything like that, you want to map the pages – I’ll tell you how in a moment. Essentially, you’re trying to think about what pages your website needs.
Then you can generate the text, and I’m specifically saying “generate” because I know you’re going to use AI. Let’s not be shy – we’ll all do it with AI, and I can’t imagine actually typing it all out in 2026.
Dominique is also asking about Figma, and I’ll touch on that. But back to text: if you’re going to use AI, I’ll tell you what to do and not do when generating the text for your website. Finally, there are images and media – you have to have some pictures on your website, and maybe you have some videos.
To map the pages, these are the options you have: Octopus.do, FigJam and Miro. With these, you can create a sitemap, even for free.
This is Octopus.do, and this sitemap is one I created for a choreographer – a lady who teaches people how to dance. You can see how helpful it is, because we’re already working out how the page will be divided into sections: testimonials, a showcase of the services and an FAQ.
Then there are the other pages of the website. She coaches and mentors people, so it’s nice to have a page about that, and we’ll be talking about her as an instructor. We also want to hit the SEO keywords, so we’ll list the dance styles she specialises in – ballet, jazz, contemporary.
So we’re already trying to get a bird’s-eye view of the content of the website, but we’re not going granular or into the detail – we just have a map. These three tools are very good for it.
Whether you’ve built your website already or you’re planning to, I highly recommend you go back and create that map. It’s super easy and fun, and it really pushes you to think strategically.
Next, generate the text and SEO for each page – not only the text, but also the SEO details you might need. Most platforms let you enter those details, and that will help you rank.
It’s not always going to beat the competitors – that’s a long-term goal if you want to beat them on Google – but it’s a basic thing you have to do. So here are the AI dos and don’ts for text and SEO: when to use it and how to prompt it.
On the left are the dos and on the right are the don’ts. Do provide AI with the context of your business – you should know your offer, the features and maybe your unique selling point, and I’m sure Enterprise Nation has been helpful in developing that. And upload information about your target audience.
This is the first step if you want to work with me. I’ll help you position yourself and create a target audience persona, so I encourage you to visit websiteisnotenough.com, where you can see how I go about positioning my clients before we even get into the branding or the website.
You want to ask not only for the text for each page, but also for the SEO. You might also upload some pictures or branding you’ve already created, so it gets the context of what you’re trying to do.
Then you must review whether the content looks robotic and whether it’s genuinely useful, because you want it to be useful rather than just whatever. This ties in with the don’ts.
Don’t skip brainstorming and goal setting – that’s your job, not AI’s. It can help you, but goal setting, brainstorming and coming up with features is really something only you can do.
You know where your business is heading and what you want to achieve, and maybe you have a mission you want to go by. So don’t skip brainstorming by using AI to do everything for you.
Don’t create slop and distribute it to your potential customers. We all know how this looks – a super-long, AI-generated post about nothing is not going to do you any favours. So be very strict about what you allow to show on your website.
Don’t just copy and paste from AI. It’s your job to filter through the slop, and only genuinely useful information should make it onto the website.
Don’t rely on it to engage and connect with your audience. People try to automate that, and it doesn’t work. You have to be there and be connected with people – you have to attend bootcamps, go networking and comment on other people’s content.
AI is not going to do that for you, and people are not fooled by it at all. Finally, don’t blindly follow its design.
You might be tempted – Lovable is an example. You ask it to create a super website for this and that, and if you give it the context – the audience, the offer and what you’re about – it might come up with something decent.
But it’s your job to decide whether it’s good enough, whether it looks generic or whether it has some uniqueness and soul to it. Don’t just take the design AI gives you and publish it – you have to be critical.
So these are the AI dos and don’ts for writing text. We’ll be going into that in the practical section in the second hour, so you’ll get some direction on how to prompt AI for text and SEO, and what SEO to ask it to provide. I’ll give you some tips.
Now to styles and layouts. Ideally, you have your branding in place – at least a logo, colours and a font.
You want to use Google Fonts because they’re widely available, so you won’t end up in a situation where you can’t use your font in Canva or somewhere else because you’ve picked a bespoke one. So try to keep it simple: a couple of colours, fonts and a logo would be nice to have before you design your website.
Benchmark the best, and don’t reinvent the wheel. If there’s a website – even a competitor’s – that you think is working great, and you know the company is doing well, there’s no reason not to benchmark it and try to be like them.
I’m not telling you to copy them verbatim, but if they have a certain structure or mention certain things, they probably have a very good reason for it. So don’t reinvent the wheel thinking you’ll be different and better – try to emulate the success they’re experiencing.
Do I suggest any AI for website planning? It can help you research and come up with patterns, but it’s very much talking back to you and repeating what you say if you really look at what it’s doing.
Everything we’ve discussed here can be done with a piece of paper and a bit of will. You just have to set aside a couple of hours, and in half a day, you’ll have done it way better than AI can, at least at the minute.
So I wouldn’t suggest using AI for the final plan, but I would certainly use it to help me. I would use AI for anything, really, but it eats into your day – are you creating slop work, or are you actually achieving something? With the checklist we’re going by, you should be able to do it even without AI.
When it comes to styling and layouts, you need to think about the flexibility of the platform you’re using. As I mentioned, WordPress is super flexible, especially if you connect it with Elementor Pro.
Other platforms aren’t so flexible because they need to ensure they’re responsive, and it’s very difficult to make sure a super-complex desktop layout translates to mobile. You want to keep the layout simple, so some platforms will help you, and some will limit you, which is also not a bad thing.
Here’s a super tip: draw the pages first. Use a fat marker, because if you use a pencil, you’re going to go into the details.
You want 60-second drawings. In one minute, think about what you want on that page, draw it, and then it will be so much easier for you to build.
It’s a minimal investment of time and effort, and it highlights gaps in your strategy or missing content. If you think, “Oh, I’d love a video here,” and you don’t have one, it will come up at that stage before it’s too late.
It’s so much easier when you do this, because when you develop, whichever tool you use, you know what you’re trying to build. I believe this recording will be available, so you can go back to the parts you’re interested in, and you’re more than welcome to visit websiteisnotenough.com, where you can reach me directly, or contact me through the Enterprise Nation network.
We’re 35 minutes in. We know we need to draw our pages and have them ready, and then we can start building, and here we’ll answer some of the questions from the chat.
We have Wix, and I’m showing you the builder dashboard, and on the right, we have WordPress. You can already see they’re kind of similar: you have a bunch of widgets – image, text, video – and you can drag them onto the canvas.
This is why drawing what’s on each page is important. If you go in with a white page, you’ll start playing, and I promise you, I’ve seen it happen nine out of 10 times – you waste weeks trying to fix it and make it look good; it ends up complex, and it doesn’t achieve the goals.
But if you have that plan – the drawing you made beforehand – it’s so easy. You just drag and drop and build it, which will save you a ton of time and make sure it all hangs together rather than just looking pretty.
So they look similar, but maybe not when it comes to ecommerce. Is Shopify better than WordPress?
On the right-hand side, you can see very tiny pictures of the products – these are digital products, by the way – and it doesn’t look easy to manage. On the left, I’ve put a Shopify dashboard, and Square is similar. You can see they include other things like marketing, discounts, products and orders, so it’s all easier to manage.
It does come at a price with Shopify, so you might want to look at Square, which is a little cheaper and a little more basic. It really depends: if you have a proper, fully fledged shop with hundreds of products and variations, Shopify is the way. Otherwise, Square, WordPress or Wix can work.
You have to weigh it up, because it’s not just about how it looks to your customer – it’s about you. You have to log in and deal with the orders coming in, so you really want to go to YouTube and research the platform you’re considering.
Deborah is helping us here with a quick tip. Try the CRIT framework when prompting AI: context, role, interview and task. It’s a simple but effective way to move beyond generic responses and use AI as a strategic thinking and brainstorming tool.
Absolutely – that’s exactly what I was trying to tell you as well: give it some context. So let’s see where we are now.
We have clearly defined goals for the users, the business and the website. We’ve got the list of features, or at least the must-haves, and we’ve got content and design, so we know the map of the website and what goes on each page.
Then there’s the additional set-up, which includes picking your domain. My best tip for you is: don’t overthink it.
It’s nice if it describes your business somehow. You don’t want mickeymouse.com – you want mickeymouseconsultingforentrepreneurs.com, because it will help your SEO a little if it explains what you do.
My website’s original domain was branddebbie.com [domain unclear in transcript], and I’m still using it because it’s established. But I then bought websiteisnotenough.com because it’s so much easier to remember, so think about that.
Whether it’s .com or .co.uk doesn’t really matter in 2026 – it’s not a biggie, although .com will rank a little higher on Google. And consider buying through the platform: if you know you’ll be using Squarespace, buy it through Squarespace.
I don’t usually advise against companies, but GoDaddy makes it seem cheap. Then they want to upgrade you to their website builder, which is terrible, and sell you their hosting, which is also not great, so try not to go with GoDaddy.
You can buy a domain with anyone and then use another tool, so you don’t have to buy with the same platform. But it’s nice to, because it makes things easier.
You can set up your email with Google Business. I like it because it’s flexible and easy to do. You could also set it up with the company you bought your domain from, but Google Business is really what you want because it’s very much like Gmail, so there’s no learning curve – you already know how to manage it.
Jenny is saying she likes GoDaddy for domains, and the same domain will be available elsewhere. With domains, GoDaddy will again try to lock you in – if you want to transfer your domain away from them, they like to charge for the key you’ll need.
So I’m saying avoid GoDaddy, but I know a lot of people buy their domains there, and if you feel that’s the way for you, you can do it. It’s not a huge decision who you buy with, but there are other domain providers that are maybe less cheeky than GoDaddy, and my experience and my clients’ experience haven’t been great.
Now for the reality of website security, because that also ties into hosting and the companies you work with. First of all, bots – robots – are constantly scanning the internet, including your website and all websites.
Most of it is harmless and isn’t doing much harm to your website or data, but you want to cover your back. It can cause spam – fake enquiries through your forms – which you probably don’t want, so you can install a CAPTCHA, the “are you human?” check, and the bot will have a harder time bypassing it.
A bot might want to hack your website just because it can. I know how annoying a 12-character password with a special character is, but it’s there for a reason.
So try to use a strong password when you can, especially for WordPress, because it’s a little vulnerable. If you’re using other platforms, the company that owns the platform is responsible for it, so it’s less of a worry.
Then there’s data scraping, where bots look for information and collect it, so you don’t want any sensitive data to be visible or accessible. Bots can also disrupt your website and mess it up, so you must have a backup. I recommend a daily backup, and GoDaddy doesn’t do daily backups – it isn’t included – which is another reason I don’t like using GoDaddy for hosting.
So how do you stay protected? I need you to remember this one. Keep WordPress updated, because if you don’t, it’s easier to break into, and use strong passwords.
Choose reliable hosting – not some company from far away with no support. I use SiteGround, but there’s Bluehost, 1&1, even GoDaddy – just make sure you check what’s included in your package. Maintain regular backups and build protected forms.
On the scale we’re talking about – micro businesses, solopreneurs, startups – there’s no real gain for anyone in breaking into your website. It might just happen because of the automated bots.
So I wouldn’t say don’t worry about it at all, but it’s not as big a priority as it would be for a bigger company. Cool, so let’s recap.
We’re 43 minutes in, so we might want to recap a little. I think something didn’t transfer over to this slide properly, but we’ve established why people would visit a website.
We’ve researched and planned using AI to help, but not predominantly. We know the features, the platform and the competition, and maybe we’ve benchmarked a website we like and want to be like.
We’ve prioritised good content, because that’s really why most people visit websites – for the content and the SEO. SEO is in the second part because it’s maybe a bit boring but important, and I wanted to make sure you stay for the second part.
And stay safe – prevent spam and people breaking into your website through weak passwords, that sort of thing. So join us for part two to apply the theory to your website.
We’ve agreed we’ll have a five- or 10-minute break, and we can come back to the session at 1 pm, so feel free to have a little breather and get your notes together. For the second part, it would be helpful to have a pen and paper, because we’ll be working on your website specifically.
I’m telling you, whatever you put on that piece of paper will be what you walk out of this session with and what you can actually action for your own website or your client’s website. So prepare a pen and paper.
I’m going to stop sharing, and I’ll come back in... I don’t know how to stop sharing now – one second. OK, I think I’ll just do this: stop presentation sharing.
It’s 10 to one, so I think 10 minutes is enough, and you can rejoin in 10 minutes. In the meantime, if you have some questions, I might be looking at the chat anyway, so if you don’t want to have a cup of tea with me, you can ask some questions, and I’ll try to answer as many as I can.
[Note: the recording appears to pause during the break and resumes partway through the second half, during the task on website pages. The earlier part of the practical session is not in the transcript.]
There are eight or nine page types here. Maybe there’s a specific landing page you want to build – number four, service landing pages, or maybe a landing page for call booking so you can sell the call.
A landing page is basically a page with one goal in mind, one offer and one action. You can see on my website that my home page is almost a landing page for what I do.
The first thing I like my clients to do is invest in the positioning call, so they can work out all those important bits before we build the website, consider building one or even do the branding. So a landing page has one thing in mind, and on my page, that’s for people to benefit from that call.
Portfolio pages – of course we like to have those. But do you have enough pictures to show, and enough projects and case studies? If not, less is more.
You don’t have to have all these pages on your website – you want to be strategic. A three-page website that’s well done, speaks to your audience and has all these goals in mind will be much better than a website with 52 different pages.
I also wouldn’t count the pages of your blog as pages as such, because they can use one template with different content. So, one, three, six – home, store pages, blog and learning.
If you have store pages, you also need a privacy policy, a cookie policy and all that sort of thing, because you need to cover your back. Lydia, I have an example of a landing page: websiteisnotenough.com.
Also, if you type “best landing pages” into Google or AI, you’ll see Netflix. You go there, and it’s one screen that says “sign up” – that’s a landing page, and it’s very high-converting for Netflix.
There’s no choice but to sign up, because there’s nothing else for you to do there. They’re winning with the fact that everybody knows what they do.
As for resources pages, I like to call that a blog – it’s pretty much the same thing. With AI, I’m sorry to say, all the resources are already out there, so what type of resource can you come up with that will be better than just AI? You have to think about it.
I’ve spent a lot of time developing resources for my potential clients and my clients. It’s great for SEO because it’s good content, but they can now get it online themselves.
So maybe the way you put it together is what makes the difference – that’s your know-how. I didn’t include resources pages here, and it’s a good one to put down, but you need to be very mindful of what you’re going to include there.
Then you can go online and tell people to visit your website because there’s a resources page they might benefit from, so it’s a good idea. So that was website pages, which was the final task we had.
However, there’s a bonus task, and this goes to website text. I did mention the word “generate” because, of course, we’re thinking of using ChatGPT, Claude or another AI – some people pay for it, and some use the free version.
There’s a prompt below that I think you can use because you’ve completed these tasks. You can enter the details you’ve jotted down into the space here and enter your website page goal, and the resulting text will be much better than without it.
What you need to think about is not producing too much text, because that’s not good either, and making sure it’s not just AI-generated without you revising it and thinking about it. You also want the AI to provide you with an SEO title, focus key phrase and meta description.
Those would be entered on each page, and most platforms have a space for the SEO title, focus key phrase and meta description. Let’s imagine I’m a consultant – well, I am a consultant – and I build websites for service-based businesses.
So my SEO title might be: “websiteisnotenough.com home page – get a website that works for your service business”. That title, along with the meta description, is usually what’s shared on social media.
When you share your link, there’s a title and a little bit of writing below it, which is usually controlled through the SEO title and meta description. So this is the only bit that will show to people on social media.
I’m talking about LinkedIn predominantly, because Instagram works a bit differently, but this bit will show, so you want to make sure it entices people to visit that particular page. The focus key phrase is something the Google bot reads to gauge what the page is about, so again, it’s important – but the AI will produce it for you, so you don’t have to worry too much.
As for SEO versus GEO, the difference between search engine optimisation and geographic optimisation is that if you’re a physical store, you need to focus on the local audience. But if you’re a consultant like me, I don’t need to worry about people specifically in North London finding me.
It doesn’t have to be Belsize Park – they can be in Manchester. So I’m positioning myself a little differently, and I’m not positioning to be found in a specific location.
So this is the prompt. I think it’ll be difficult for you to copy and paste, so if you want, you can go to websiteisnotenough.com and get in touch with me, and I’ll send you the text.
I might even build a little page so you can copy and paste it – I just haven’t had time to do it. Or maybe I could paste it in here. I’ll paste it at the end of the session so we can all benefit from it, and the Q&A might be a good time to do this.
So, in theory, we’ve completed the five tasks and done what we said we would in the first part, and we have all the pieces together. We had 60 seconds for each, so you might want to go back and have a proper think about these things, maybe rewatching the session once the video comes out.
As a reminder: impact on revenue, user goals, website goals, website features and the pages of your website. You might want to take a screenshot of this, because you now know how to do it, so you can go and do it in your own time.
But don’t spend too much time on it, because that’s procrastination. You want actual notes and decisions, and then go with it.
If it doesn’t work, you can change your strategy, but if you don’t set a strategy, you don’t know whether it’s working. So try to come up with those five things, and then you can use the prompt to generate text.
Now we’re going back to advertising your website and making you visible. First of all, be easy to find – talking about the things you provide on your website will make it easier for people to find you online. Maybe open a Google Business Profile, because that also helps Google understand what you do and how to find you, specifically if you have a physical store or office.
Make it easy to understand. You don’t need all this jargon – nobody likes it. Just talk the way you talk, and it’s fine.
You may want to polish it up with AI, but I think the draft and the soul – the root of it – should come from you. And be easy to trust: show your face.
People are very shy about showing their face for their business, and I think representing your own business is one of the most powerful things you can do. So try to build a bit of a personal brand on LinkedIn or Instagram – showing your face to people really is worth doing.
Your goal is no longer just to appear in search results, but to become a business that AI tools can confidently recommend. That’s because AI search, which now comes above the actual search results, isn’t just recommending websites that fit the search – it’s recommending websites that fit the search and appear credible to AI.
So writing your text with SEO in mind, making sure the images are there and making sure people visit your website because they have a good reason to will mean AI starts recommending it. It’s no longer about appearing in results – it’s about being recommended as the company for that particular job, so it’s definitely important.
Deborah is helping us here by mentioning GEO – generative engine optimisation. While SEO helps your website rank in search results, GEO focuses on getting your business referenced and recommended by AI tools like ChatGPT.
Deborah, maybe I need to do my own research on that on top of what I know, but I think what I said stands. Your content needs to be genuine and useful, not slop and not too much – just the right amount that hits the spot.
Being useful and trustworthy always helps you become visible in AI, and I think GEO covers that as well. It’s no longer about “the more, the better” – it used to be, “Let me have a blog with a million articles.” But they need to be articles people actually want to read.
I have people telling me they’re a little shy to show their face. Listen, we all have phones with good cameras: stand in front of a window, take a picture and drop it into AI to retouch it if you need to.
If you’re too shy to represent your own company, nobody will do it better than you, so you need to reconsider this, because you are your biggest asset on this entrepreneurial journey. You might have a second job and not want to reveal that you’re running a side hustle, and I appreciate that. But if you can go out into the world and advertise your own venture, it’s very, very powerful.
Google Business Profile is one of the most valuable free tools for local businesses. It’s very easy to set up, especially if you’ve set up your email with Google Business, or Google Workspace, or whatever they call it now.
It’s designed for physical stores, so they can be found on Google Maps as well, but anyone can have a Google Business Profile. I have one; I’ve just updated it, and it’s great for being found – so it’s free of charge, easy to set up and worth doing.
And Dominique Edwards, who seems to know a lot about a lot, is saying personal branding is everything in 2026, and I couldn’t agree more. I’ve pretty much built my success on representing my own company.
On to the bootcamp conclusions, which means we’re heading towards the end of the theory and can start chatting together. You have to establish why people would visit your website, because it will help you advertise it.
You need to spend most of your time planning, preparing and going through the tasks we’ve just covered, rather than jumping straight into Squarespace and designing. That’s a rookie mistake a lot of people make – and you won’t, because you’ve made the effort to be here at the bootcamp today.
Prioritise your content and features, not the look. Use the list we’ve created today – maybe have another think about these things, but use that list to build.
And remember, a website is not enough. You need to advertise your website and think about coming up in searches.
What’s important is that once people find you, they come to something credible – something that helps them achieve their goals. On that note, let me stop sharing, and our lovely host can take over and bring up any questions we might have skipped, or you may have your own questions. Over to you now.
Karla: Thank you so much, Aggie, for an incredible presentation, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. I hope you’ve found the session valuable.
Before we go into the questions, I’m going to launch the exit survey so you can start completing it while we go through them. I can see it’s launched – perfect.
We have a couple of questions from the audience. The first question is: what about Google Business for service-based businesses and consultancies?
Aggie: That’s specifically what I do and have done. For many years, I thought organic SEO – writing copy and producing articles and resources – was going to do it for me.
It helped to a great degree, but it’s difficult to keep coming up with that content all the time. And now, with AI, I think it’s difficult to come up with content that people can’t find through AI.
So I’d go back to personal brand. I tried to hide behind my own company for a long time, but since I started going out there, talking with people, networking, and even recording myself talking about my business, customers have become more receptive.
I decided LinkedIn was the place for me, and I think for any consultant, LinkedIn is the way through. My super tip would be not to focus on broadcasting what you want to say, but to comment on other people’s content – other experts’ content.
If your comments are credible and you’re answering questions and being helpful, people will click on your profile. And if you have a good call to action on your profile, like “book a call with me” or “see my website”, the job’s done. So for consultants, SEO is important, but maybe not as important as it is for product-based businesses that want to sell specific things online.
Karla: Thank you. The next question is from Valia: does the advice about showing our face still apply to modelling our own products? I make jewellery and accessories, and I’m at the beginning of setting up online sales, so I don’t have a model to hire.
Aggie: I’m writing a book, and I thought it would be nice if it was an audiobook, so I thought I’d use AI or hire a voiceover actor. Then I put it through AI and it said, “Oh, Aggie, it would be so much better if it was you reading it.”
So I’d encourage you by all means to model your own products. Maybe don’t position it as the main picture in your store, because a model might do a better job as they’re suited to it.
But you want to show yourself wearing and using your products on Instagram, 100%, if not TikTok. If you’re not going to wear or use the items, who else will?
You absolutely need to have that bag with you everywhere you go and talk about it: “It’s the bag I’m producing, it’s the bag I’m using, and my friends use it.” So yes, be your own model for your own business.
Karla: Perfect. Another question we have is: would you recommend an email address from Google Business rather than from the website provider?
Aggie: Google, being the giant that they are and actually doing a good job for their customers, has become so popular that with most providers – even GoDaddy, I think, or IONOS and other companies – you can get Google Business email through them. You basically pay the same subscription to the same company, and they have a deal with Google.
So I’d absolutely encourage you to keep everything in one place as much as possible. But be careful how much they charge you for it, because they may add a little on top.
I think right now in the UK, an email account is £9 a month, if I’m not mistaken, and it comes with some perks, of course, like some cloud storage with Google. So just be wary of paying too much to the provider if you’re going through them.
You should be able to get Google Business through them. Otherwise, they have their own email clients, but they’re never going to be as good as Google, I’m sorry to say.
Karla: Perfect, thank you. Just a reminder, everyone – please don’t forget to complete the exit survey. I can see we’re still missing some people, so please do it while we’re going through the questions.
Another question we have is: can you talk more about how to approach GEO and AEO? Are there any good resources?
Aggie: Marcela, I can see you’re kind of ahead of the pack with all of this. Listen, I’ll tell you something: build your website first and make sure it includes valuable content, and then your job of advertising it through any means – SEO, GEO, AEO – will be much easier.
As small businesses or startups, we only have so much capacity to do things ourselves. SEO and GEO are a whole different discipline – I’d say marketing is one thing, and SEO is a completely different animal.
Because things are progressing so fast, it will be extremely difficult for you to do it completely right yourself and always be at the top of the rankings. It’s changing so fast that even experts have a problem, though they won’t admit it – to a degree, they’ve lost control of being able to help with it.
Because AI is so sophisticated, it will recommend websites that are actually genuine. There’s no trick around it – no “I’m going to type in more keywords and be more likely to come up”.
So you want to educate yourself on SEO, GEO and all the Os. Use YouTube, try to learn about it and do some of the things you can yourself. But if you’re seriously thinking about investing in that kind of marketing, you’ll need to consult an expert.
It’s good to do the basics – the key phrase, the title and what comes up when you share your link online are important, and they’re part of SEO. The second thing – or the first thing, actually – is good content, and then you hand it over to the expert.
Karla: Amazing. If you could recommend one next step for our audience to take after this session, what would it be?
Aggie: It really depends on whether they have a website and want to make it better, or whether they don’t have a website yet. I would absolutely try to get a couple of quotes from experts – you can go to Upwork or Toptal and see what they’d charge.
I actually have a little calculator that will give you the price of your website depending on the features you pick, so you can go to websiteisnotenough.com and try that. If somebody quotes you a couple of thousand, let’s say, you might not have it, so you know you have to do it yourself.
But if you’re getting a grant or you have some capital to invest in your company, don’t skip the goal setting and the five steps we went through. Hand them over to the developer or designer, and they’ll come up with a super-successful website.
You can do it yourself, but you might want to consider paying someone, because the time it takes you, even with my help today and Enterprise Nation’s help, might not be justifiable. Unless you know exactly what you want, you’re quite disciplined and you don’t spend weeks on it – if you give it a week, you can probably launch it.
So if you’re confident, you know what you want, you feel you can do it technically, and you have the pictures and everything together, do it. Otherwise, why not see whether it might be cheaper and easier to work with somebody who’s done it a million times?
Karla: Amazing. What’s your advice on which website providers to choose when you have multiple businesses and websites?
Aggie: First of all, when I hear that somebody has multiple businesses and websites, I worry – why? Do you really have time to commit, with one business getting 50% of your attention and another 50%?
If the businesses are both service-based and you’ve built a website with, let’s say, Squarespace, you might want to stay with that tool, because it makes sense to keep everything within one platform so you don’t have to learn new tools. But if they’re vastly different, the simple answer is that you have to split yourself in half.
I’d rethink running two businesses and two websites. If you are going to go for it, try not to expand the number of tools you use – keep it lean, because the cost also creeps in.
Karla: Perfect. Another question we have is: could I confuse customers if I start by selling second-hand clothes and then move on to selling brand-new clothes? I’m worried it might make it harder for me to establish and grow my own brand in the future.
Aggie: I love the question, because it tells me you know it’ll be a problem, so you have to resolve that problem. It won’t confuse your customers if you make it explicit and explain it well.
You might want to come up with a name for that second-hand service – let’s say “Second-hand by [your brand]”. If you make it clear to people, and it ties in with what you do anyway, they’ll understand it.
But if you’re selling second-hand trainers and your brand produces cutlery, let’s say, that’s suspicious – you’d want them to operate in the same sphere. So as long as you’re clear and upfront and it’s easy to understand, it’s fine.
You might want to run it by people who don’t know you or about that duality and ask whether they understand what the website does. If they don’t, it’s not clear enough. So you can do it, but you have to be clear – and check it’s clear not just to you, but to other people.
Karla: Perfect. Another question we have is: if a business has a website that gets visitors but very few enquiries or sales, what would you look at first?
Aggie: I’d first consider what “busy” means. If an average website converts at two to 4%, then out of 100 visitors, in theory, two should get in touch.
I’ve seen very few startup websites that attract 100 people a day – maybe 100 a month. So have you checked that at least 100 people have visited?
It might also show that you’re getting a lot of traffic, but is it genuine traffic, or does it come from India because it’s bots? And secondly, if it’s genuine traffic, maybe it’s not from people who are interested in your offer.
When I started on LinkedIn, I initially had an audience of other designers. But other designers aren’t my customers, because they can build their own websites, so I realised they were coming to my website and not enquiring, even though I had a lot of traffic.
So I made an effort to grow my network to include people who might be interested in my offer. Now, whoever visits the website is actually a potential customer rather than a competitor.
The conversion changed, not because I did something to the website, but because I was more mindful of who I was attracting. It’s not good enough to just attract millions of people – you need to attract the people who actually want your service or product, or something similar. So it might indicate that you’re attracting the wrong crowd or, unfortunately, that you’re attracting bots.
Karla: Thank you so much. We’re receiving really good comments in the chat – lots of thank yous, and people have loved the session.
Just a reminder to please complete the exit survey, as we’re still missing a couple of people. We also have this comment: “My confidence in website development is kind of low, but thanks for this. I have had some tips I have to look back and work on.”
Thank you so much, Linda, for sharing that amazing feedback. Another question we had is: how do you approach a website when a business provides more than one service?
Aggie: It’s tricky, and I think it really comes down to your service stack. What you really want is an entry offer – for me, that’s the positioning call, which is a small investment with a lot of value.
Then I have branding as an offer, because some clients are missing it, and then a complementary one: once you have the branding, you can build the website. So you can see they complement each other, and each one is a step up from the last.
The first one is a small investment with great value. The second is also great value – or expensive, let’s call it – and then you have the website, because that really completes the whole thing.
So instead of offering five different things, think about a stack. Maybe you can get people a little further to where they want to be but not the whole way, or maybe you can offer the whole way but cut it into pieces.
It depends on what you’re offering, but your services shouldn’t differ too much – they should still sit within your discipline. As a UX and web designer, I can also do logos and branding, but I’m not positioning myself as a logo designer.
I’m positioning myself as a person who can help you position yourself and build a tool that does it all. So I’m not talking about logos specifically – I’m talking about my entire offer, and depending on where the person is in their business journey or what they need, you can pick from the offers.
The first offer is always the entry offer, and if you come up with a good one, you’ll have an easy job later on. So think about that entry service: are you going to advise them, do something for them, or offer something they can download, which could be automated? If you have different services, just try to focus on solving the person’s problem rather than on the services you’re offering, if that makes sense.
Karla: Amazing. Thank you so much, Aggie – it’s been an amazing workshop. I hope everyone has found the session valuable and that you’re leaving with practical tips and tools to support your business growth.
We’ve gone through all the questions now, so thank you so much, everyone. We’ll send a follow-up email later today with a link to the recording and additional resources.
As a reminder, we’ll be back next week with a session on email marketing. It will take place at the same time, midday, and I’ll be sending the Zoom joining link later today as well. And a big thank you, Aggie, for joining us today and sharing your expertise.
Aggie: Thank you so much, and the best of luck, everyone. I really encourage you to stay with Enterprise Nation, because they are the best and they’ve helped me so much, so thank you to you as well.
On that note, have a great day, and I’ll see you next time. Bye.
Karla: Thank you so much, and thank you, everyone. Have a lovely day. Bye.
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