01The six that matter
A visitor decides in seconds, and they are deciding whether you can do the thing they need, near them, at a price they can live with. Those six items answer exactly that and nothing else. The most common failure is putting a slogan where the answer should be, which spends the only four seconds you get on a sentence the visitor cannot act on. Prices are the item people argue about most: hiding them does not create buyers, it filters out the ones who would have booked and keeps the ones who intend to negotiate.
- What you do, in the words a customer would use, above the fold and without a slogan in front of it.
- Where you are. A city and a district, in the text, not only on a map embed.
- What it costs, or a range. Hiding it filters out buyers, it does not create them.
- Proof: real photos of real work, and a review count rather than copied review text.
- One contact method that is obvious and works at 11pm.
- Speed on a phone, which is where almost everyone will open it.
02What you can skip
These get quoted often and earn their cost rarely at this size. A banner carousel is the clearest example: measurement has been consistent for over a decade that almost nobody sees slide two, yet it survives because it lets everyone in a meeting have their message on the homepage. The others share a shape. An empty blog dated two years ago actively signals abandonment. An unstaffed chat widget promises a response and does not deliver one. Stock photos of a team that is not your team do the opposite of building trust, because visitors recognise them.
- A carousel of banners. People do not wait for slide two.
- A team page with stock photos, which does the opposite of building trust.
- A blog you will never write. An empty blog dated two years ago is worse than none.
- A live chat widget nobody is staffed to answer.
- An intro animation between the visitor and the phone number.
03The four pages that are usually enough
Ship these four and add more once you know what people actually ask you, which you will only learn after the site exists. The instinct to plan every page in advance is what turns a two-week project into a six-month one, and the extra pages are usually guesses about questions nobody asks. There is also a maintenance argument: five pages you keep accurate beat fifteen where three quietly carry last year's prices. Being wrong in public costs more trust than being brief does.
- Home: what you do, where, proof, one call to action.
- Services: one section or page per service, each with a price or a range.
- About: why you rather than the other one, in your own words.
- Contact: phone, address, hours, map, and a form for the people who will not call.
The detail a hotel site lives or dies on
On Santorini Hotel the thing that mattered most was not the gallery. It was that the reception, restaurant and complaints phone numbers are on the page and in the structured data, so a guest can call the right line and search engines read the property as a hotel rather than a generic page. Small, unglamorous, and the first thing a guest actually needs. Most sites bury it in a footer and lose the call.
See the build: Santorini HotelQuestions, answered
Do I need an About page at all?
For a service business, yes. People are buying a person as much as a service, and it is often the second page they open. For a store, it matters less than the product pages.
How many pages is too many?
When you stop being able to keep them accurate. Five correct pages beat fifteen where three have last year's prices on them.
Should I really publish prices?
A range at minimum. We publish ours for exactly this reason: it costs us the people who were never going to buy and wins the ones who were tired of asking.
Where PROOF48 fits
The 48 hour build is exactly this list. Up to five pages, your services with real prices, your photos, contact that works, fast on a phone. You send one reference link and pay only if you love the result.
Cosmin Tiu · Founder, PROOF48
Cosmin has worked in online marketing and software development since 2018, and has built with AI every day since January 2023. He still writes code from scratch daily, in Python, React, Rust and C#. PROOF48 ships business websites in 48 hours and invoices afterwards, so every opinion on this blog was paid for in real builds, not in theory.