Zero to live
How to make a website for your business
You do not need to write code, and you do not need to hire anyone, to get a first version up. What you do need is three things: a decision about what the site is for, a name you have actually checked, and about an afternoon of real photos and real sentences. This page walks you through the six steps in the order that works, and says what to check before you send the link to a customer.
Allow two to four hours for a first version if your photos and opening hours are already to hand, plus a second sitting a few days later to fix what you only notice after living with it.
Have these ready before you start.
- Eight to fifteen photographs of the real place, the real work, or the real product, taken on a phone in daylight. Stock images of somebody else's shop make a new business look like it has not opened yet.
- The facts a customer will look for: the trading name, the street address, opening hours, a phone number somebody answers, and the service or menu list with the prices you actually charge.
- A decision about the name, and a card to buy the domain with. A domain is bought from a registrar and renewed yearly, and that cost is separate from whatever you use to build the site.
Decide the one thing the site has to do
Before you look at a single design, finish this sentence: a stranger lands on this page and I want them to ___. Book a table. Call for a quote. Come in before six. Order for pickup. Pick one, and everything else becomes secondary. That answer decides what the biggest button says, what goes at the top of the home page, and how many pages you actually need — most first sites need four (home, services or menu, about, contact) and nothing more. Write the sentence somewhere you can see it, and use it to settle every argument you later have with yourself.
Settle the name, then buy the domain
Check the name before you commit to it: search the company or business registry where you will trade for the same and near-identical names, search your national trademark register the same way, and only then check whether the domain is free. Buy the domain from a registrar in your own name, on your own email address — not through a designer's account, because a domain registered to somebody else is the one thing you cannot get back later. Easy to say beats clever: somebody will have to read it off a receipt over the phone. If you are still hunting, the free store name generator at /tools joins a keyword to what you do and gives you a list to start deleting from; it does not check availability, and that check stays yours.
Start from an industry layout, not a blank page
A blank canvas is why most first websites are abandoned in week two. Pick a starting point built for your line of work instead. Naratake has 40 industry starting templates, and each already carries the sections that kind of business needs: a menu structure for a restaurant, a service-and-quote structure for a plumber or an electrician, a booking structure for a salon, a listing structure for property. You are editing something rather than inventing it. Appearance is a separate decision from structure — there are 15 design styles and 66 colour presets, plus 111 components for adding or removing sections, so changing the look does not mean rebuilding the page. Give yourself twenty minutes here and then stop. Content is what people came for.
Replace every word and every photo with your own
This step takes the longest and decides whether the site works. Delete the sample text completely — a page still saying Your Business Name is what tells a visitor nobody finished this. Write the way you would speak at the counter: what you do, where you are, when you open, what it costs. Put prices in even if they can only be a range; a page that hides prices earns a phone call asking for prices, and more often no call at all. Put real photos at the top and one on each service. Then check the boring facts one at a time, because these are what customers act on: the phone number, the address spelled the way the post office spells it, and the opening hours including the day you close.
Check it on a phone before anyone else does
Almost everyone who finds a new local business is holding a phone, so the phone view is the real site and the desktop one is the rehearsal. Use the editor's mobile preview, then open the draft on your own phone and do the thing you wrote down in step one: tap the button, place the call, submit the form, and confirm the message actually arrives. Watch for the four things that break first — text you have to pinch to read, a photo that pushes the page sideways, a menu button sitting on top of the phone number, and a form with more than five fields. Do it once outdoors in daylight too, because a screen you can read at your desk is not the same screen at a bus stop.
Publish, then verify the live address yourself
Publishing puts the site on a hosted address with HTTPS handled for you, and either cloud plan lets you point one domain of your own at it; what else each plan includes is on the pricing page. When the publish finishes, do not announce it yet. Open the live address in a private browser window — not the editor preview — and walk the whole thing again: home page, every link in the navigation, the main button, and one genuine test submission. Confirm the padlock is there and the address begins with https. Only then send the link to anybody. If you want the files as well as the live site, there are two routes. Storefront Pro includes the site source as a download; the desktop app, LocalSite Studio, is a one-time purchase rather than a subscription and exports the whole codebase as often as you like. Either way you can host the result wherever you want, and the pricing page carries both.
Four things to do in the week after you publish.
- Claim your listing on Google Business Profile and on whichever map apps people near you actually use, and make the name, address, phone number and hours identical to the ones on the site. When the two disagree, customers turn up at a closed door.
- Put the web address everywhere the business already appears: the shop window, the receipt, the footer of your invoices, your social profiles, and your email signature. The free QR code generator at /tools turns that link into something you can tape to the counter or print on a menu.
- Give it two weeks, then read what actually happened: which questions customers phoned to ask that the site should have answered, and which page they mentioned. Fix those sentences first. The first version of a site is a draft you wrote before you had any readers.
- Put maintenance on a date. Hours change around holidays, prices change, and a stale page loses trust faster than a plain one does. Set a recurring reminder to re-check hours, prices and photos, then publish again — the live site does not change until you do.
Questions that come up
Do I need to know how to code?
No. Naratake runs in a browser: pick a starting layout, replace the text and the photos, publish. Underneath it writes an ordinary Next.js codebase, which matters later rather than now. Storefront Pro, $79 a month, downloads that whole codebase, so a developer can take the project over or you can host it elsewhere — a real export is public at github.com/ctingyi404-cloud/naratake-export-example. Storefront, $49 a month, publishes the site and keeps the code on our side. You do not have to touch any of it to get a first version live.
What does it cost in total?
There are two costs and they are separate. The domain is bought from a registrar and renewed every year, and that bill is yours no matter who builds the site. The second is building and hosting, and what each of our plans includes is on the pricing page. To compare the options honestly, the free website cost calculator at /tools lays a monthly builder, a one-off agency build and your own hours side by side over three years; you type your own numbers and it runs in your browser.
Can the site take bookings or orders?
Yes. The industry templates carry the sections — a booking form, an order flow, a quote request — and Storefront Pro, $79 a month or $758 a year, publishes them live: orders, bookings and reservations run on your own site, paid into your own Stripe account, with Naratake taking 0% and only Stripe's card fee applying. On Storefront, $49 a month, you build and preview the same flows before they go live. Card payments use your own Stripe account and your own live keys, pasted into workspace settings — that is deliberate, and it is why the money lands in your account and never passes through ours. Start with a phone number and a form if that is all today needs; the rest switches on from the same site.
How long until it shows up in a search engine?
Nobody can promise you a position, and anyone who does is selling you something. What is under your control: publish real pages with your trading name, address and services in plain text, claim your Google Business Profile, and keep the name, address, phone and hours consistent everywhere. A search engine then needs time to crawl and index a new site — days to weeks is normal, and how many pages you have and how many links point at you both affect it. Meanwhile the link works: print it on the receipt, put it in the window, and let people use it directly.
Naratake starts from 40 industry layouts instead of a blank page, and the whole thing happens in a browser. Open the one for your line of work, swap in your own photos and your own sentences, and see how far an hour gets you before you decide anything. Either cloud plan carries one custom domain; what else each one includes is on the pricing page.
See plans and pricing