The short list
A shop on Princess Street needs four pages: a home page, a page for what you sell, a page for visiting (hours, address, phone), and a page about who runs it. A trade working from a truck needs more: a home page, one page for each service that makes the phone ring, a page for each town you regularly drive to (each saying something true only of that town), a page about who shows up at the door, and a contact page. Either one should have a short privacy page if the site has a form.
Want this handled instead of DIY'd? See pricing and get a fixed-price quote.
For most shops and trades, that's it. The rest of this guide is how to tell which list is yours, and how to trim it to the pages you'll keep true.
A good diner's menu is one laminated card, and everything on it is something the kitchen is making today. Nobody trusts a twelve-page menu at a place with four tables, because you start wondering what's been in the freezer since Easter. A small business site works the same way. Every page is a small promise that what's on it is current, and a short site is a short list of promises you can keep.
A Princess Street shop and a furnace trade, page by page
Two made-up businesses show how far apart the lists land. Neither is a client. One is a used bookshop on Princess Street. The other is a heating and cooling trade running out of Kingston to Amherstview and Odessa, and across on the ferry to Wolfe Island when the work is there.
| Page | Bookshop on Princess Street | Heating trade from a truck |
|---|---|---|
| Home | Open today or not, what kind of books, the phone number | What you fix, the towns you cover, whether you answer evenings |
| What you offer | One page: the sections you stock, whether you buy books, special orders | A page each for furnace repair, air conditioning, and maintenance plans |
| Where | A visit page with the address, door hours, holiday closures and parking in plain words | A page for each town you regularly work in, each with something true only of that town, plus a line about Wolfe Island calls |
| Who you are | A photo of the counter and the person behind it | The face that knocks on the door, and your licences |
| Contact | Folded into the visit page | Its own page, with a form that works from a phone |
| Size | Four pages, which fits Starter | Ten pages, the most Grow fits |
The bookshop's customers decide with their feet. They want to know the place is open, roughly what's on the shelves, and whether it's worth the walk up from the waterfront. One page about the stock does more than five pages about each section, because nobody plans a bookshop trip around the poetry shelf.
The heating trade is the opposite. A van parked on a driveway in Odessa sells nothing to the street. The customer has a furnace that quit at 6am and a phone in one hand. A page that says furnace repair and names Amherstview in plain words answers that person directly. A single "Services" page listing nine things answers no one, and its title can only say one thing in a search result.
The Wolfe Island line is the kind of detail that only this trade in this city needs. If you take the ferry for jobs, say so on the page for the towns you cover, and say whether island calls are booked on certain days or cost more. An islander will want that answer before they phone, and the page can give it at midnight when you're asleep.
Every page is a small promise that what's on it is current
Build the list from the questions you already answer
Templates come with a page list already filled in, and that list was written for a generic business. Yours should come from your customers.
For one week, keep a sheet of paper by the till, or in the truck's cup holder. Every time somebody asks a question before they buy, write it down, whether it came over the counter, on the phone, or in Messenger. Tally the repeats. By Friday you'll have a handful that keep coming back.
Each repeat gets an answer on the site. The big ones, the services people hire you for, get a page of their own. The small ones, like whether you take debit or where to park, get a line on the page where that question comes up. A question that came up once all week is a sentence, and it may not even be that.
If you sell to students, run the sheet again in the first week of September, when a new crowd arrives at Queen's and St. Lawrence College. Their questions show you exactly what your home page is missing for a stranger.
Pages that look necessary and aren't
Website builders and old habits both push a few pages onto small sites that don't pull their weight.
A blog is the page most worth a second thought. It only helps if somebody will keep writing it for years. A last post dated two winters ago tells a visitor the place may have gone quiet, which is the opposite of what the site is for.
A separate testimonials page is another. A good review does its best work sitting next to the service it praises, on the furnace repair page or under the photo of the bookshop counter. Gathered onto a page of their own, the quotes lose the thing they were vouching for.
A team page for a team of one belongs inside the about page. And a page for every town you've driven to once is padding. Name the occasional towns in a sentence on the page for the nearest town you cover, and save a town's own page for when that town has its own story.
The page that gets forgotten
If your contact form asks for a name, an email address or a phone number, you're collecting personal information. PIPEDA (the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act) is the federal privacy law for private-sector organizations. It applies when you collect personal information in the course of commercial activity. One of its principles, openness, says your practices for handling that information have to be clear, easy to understand and readily available, and the Privacy Commissioner's own guidance names your website as one of the places to make them available.
A short privacy page does that job in plain words: what the form collects, why, who sees it, how long you keep it, and who to contact with a question. For a four-page shop site it can be a few paragraphs. I'm not a lawyer, so if your site does more than take enquiries (stores bookings with health details, say, or takes payments), have someone qualified read it.
Once the list is settled, the website launch checklist covers what has to be true on the day the pages go live.
Common questions
- Can a small business get by with a one-page site?
- Yes, and for some shops it's the right call. One long page with sections for what you stock, your hours and how to reach you is a real site. It starts to strain when you offer several services that strangers look up separately, since a single page can only carry one title.
- Should my menu or price list be a PDF?
- Put it on the page as text. A PDF opens as a separate document that can be tiny on a phone, and you end up with two copies to remember when prices change.
- How does the number of pages change the price?
- In steps, not per page. Starter fits a few pages, Grow fits a page for each service and each area, and Complete is for a site that takes bookings or money. The numbers and what moves them are in what a website actually costs in Kingston.
- Do I need a page for each part of Kingston?
- No. Name the neighbourhoods you cover in a sentence if your customers think that way. Separate pages for downtown, the west end and Portsmouth would say the same thing three times.
Tell me whether customers come to you or you go to them, or send me your week of questions, and I'll write back with the page list I would build and which size it fits. The three sizes and their prices are on the Kingston Web Design home page, starting at $1,800. Call 613.480.1345, or email hello@kingstonwebdesigner.com.
Checked against Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada pages on 2026-10-03: PIPEDA requirements in brief, PIPEDA fair information principle 8, openness. The bookshop and the heating trade are illustrations, not clients.
