Your Business
So you're a small or medium-sized business looking for a website. Maybe you're searching for someone to build one, or maybe you're thinking about building it yourself. Either way, you're here because you think a website can help your business.
You're right. It can. But there's a lot of noise out there about what a business website actually needs to do. I want to cut through that.
Whether you're brand new to business, looking to grow, or frustrated with what you've got — this article is going to lay out the basics. Plain language, no fluff.
Where Are You Starting From?
If you're looking for a site, you're probably in one of three spots.
New to Business
Awesome. If this isn't your first business, bear with me — we might start a little basic, but I promise we'll get interesting soon.
A business does things in exchange for money. We know this, right? Good.
Businesses tend to go full tilt into making the product or service they sell. This is good — it's why we wanted to go into business to begin with. You're a plumber because you're good at plumbing. You're a consultant because you know your field. You started a bakery because you make incredible bread.
But here's the thing: if you have the best product in the world, you're still going to need someone to sell it to. Otherwise your business isn't really a business. It's a hobby.
So who do you sell to? Customers. But before they become customers, they're something else: leads.
A lead is someone who might buy from you. They've shown some interest. Maybe they found your website, maybe they heard about you from a friend, maybe they saw an ad. They're not a customer yet, but they could be.
It's unavoidable — I'm going to have to quote Alex Hormozi here. If you don't know him, he's become something of a viral business guru, and while I don't agree with everything he says, his "Core 4" framework for getting leads is solid. (acquisition.com if you want to go deeper.)
The Core 4:
- Warm outreach — reach out to people you know
- Cold outreach — reach out to people you don't know
- Content — post free stuff for people who follow you
- Paid ads — pay to show stuff to people who don't know you
That's it. Those are your options for getting leads. Everything else is a variation on one of these four.
Now here's my confession: I'm not good at outreach. I don't love cold calling. I'm not the guy who's going to teach you how to slide into DMs or work a networking event.
What I'm good at is content and tech systems. That means I'm good at the bottom half of that list — content and paid ads. And more importantly, I'm good at building the systems that make content and ads actually work. That's what I'm here to help you with.
Scaling Your Business
If you're already running a business and you're looking for a site because you want to grow, you're probably thinking about advertising. Or maybe you want a platform to share your content and build an audience.
Whatever your specific goal, we're going to cover the fundamentals of business websites in this series. The basics apply whether you're running your first Facebook ad or building out a content library.
Unhappy With Your Current Site
If you're here because your current site isn't working — leads aren't coming in, the thing feels stale, you're not sure it's actually doing anything for you — hopefully this article helps you understand why.
Stick with me. By the end of this series, you'll know what to look for and what to fix.
The Front Door Problem
Here's how most people think about business websites: it's a front door. A nice entrance to your business. You make it look good, put your name on it, and people walk in.
That's not wrong, but it's incomplete.
A pretty front door doesn't mean much if there's no reception desk on the other side. If someone walks into your office and there's nobody there to greet them, no clear sign of where to go next — they're going to turn around and leave.
Good business websites don't just look nice. They guide people. They flow from one thing to the next. Like a great office manager, the site acts as a concierge — helping visitors figure out where to go, what to do, and how to take the next step.
If your website is just a pretty door with nothing behind it, you're losing people.
The Many Facets of a Business Site
I'm going to bore you with some business systems thinking for a minute. Stay with me — this will pay off.
When we design systems, we do something called "requirements analysis." Fancy way of saying: figure out what it needs to do. When you look at the needs of a business website, you find two different types:
Functional requirements — what the system does. When someone submits a form, the business owner gets a notification. When a lead books a call, it shows up on the calendar. These are the actions, the behaviors, the things you'd put on a checklist.
Non-functional requirements — how the system is. It's fast. It looks good on phones. It's secure. It's reliable. These are qualities, not actions.
Most people only think about the first kind. They want a contact form, they want a booking page, they want a place to show off their work. But the second kind matters just as much — sometimes more.
Let me break down the facets of a business website:
Communication With Customers
This is the marketing and sales layer. It's the "who you are and why someone should care" part of your site. Your brand, your messaging, your story.
Content and ads plug in here. When someone lands on your site from a Google search or a Facebook ad, this layer is what greets them.
Functional Requirements: What Your Site Does
This is where most people's thinking stops at "I need a contact form."
But a real business operations site does more:
- Forms capture data — and that data goes somewhere useful, not just your cluttered inbox
- Replies reach customers — when you respond, it actually gets to them
- Automation kicks in — when someone expresses interest, they get an immediate response (even if you're asleep)
- Lead magnets engage visitors — interactive surveys, calculators, assessments. These aren't just fun — they warm up your leads before you ever talk to them. Someone who's answered 10 questions about their problem is way more ready to buy than someone who just filled in their email address.
Non-Functional Requirements: How Your Site Is
- Fast — if it takes more than a few seconds to load, people leave
- Mobile-friendly — more than half your visitors are on their phones
- Findable — search engines can see it, your customers can find it
- Reliable — it doesn't go down when you need it most
- Secure — customer data is protected, forms aren't getting spammed
This is where uplevers.com stands out the most. Our organization leans hard on technical capabilities. We offer speed, reliability, and security that most agencies and site builders can't match — because of the tools they use and the way they build.
But we'll get into that in later posts.
The Issue
Here's the problem: most business website tools don't cover all of these facets.
Wix, Squarespace, WordPress — these are fine tools. Seriously. I've seen businesses do great things with them.
But they succeed because the business owners understood something important: the site is a piece of their operations, not the whole thing. They didn't expect Squarespace to run their business. They used it for what it's good at — the front door, the communication layer — and built other systems around it.
The problem comes when people expect their site builder to be a business operations engine. It's not. It's a storefront. It's the reception desk appearance — but not the receptionist, the phone system, the filing cabinet, the follow-up process, or the appointment book.
When you expect a tool to do something it wasn't built for, you end up frustrated and you don't know why.
What's Coming
This is a lot to heap on a single service. This is why agencies charge huge amounts of money to build these systems for you.
But don't worry. In this series, I'm going to show you how to build some of this yourself. I'm also going to show you the tradeoffs you're making along the way — because there are always tradeoffs.
The goal is to make this useful and accessible. Not to sell you something, but to help you understand what you actually need and how to get there.
Recap
Let's bring it back to basics:
- Business — you do useful things that make your customers' lives better somehow
- Customers — they have to come from leads
- Leads — they don't pop out of thin air; they need to be cultivated
- Business websites — they CAN be a tool to cultivate leads, but you have to set them up right
That's Entry One. Next time, we'll get into the specifics.
