· Anvilstead · Web development · 4 min read
What a company website needs in 2026 — a checklist you can act on
Most company sites are a brochure that nobody updates. The version that earns its keep does three jobs: presents the business, keeps publishing, and answers visitors when no one is awake. Here is the checklist we build against.
Ask a business owner what their website is for and you usually get “so people can find us”. That is a description of hope, not a job. A website that pays for itself does three concrete things, and each one can be checked.
Job 1 — Present the business so a stranger understands it in one scroll
The test is simple: show the home page to someone outside your industry for ten seconds and ask what you do. If they cannot say, the page is decorative.
What we build to pass that test:
- A one-sentence statement of what you do, above the fold, without adjectives
- Who it is for — the specific customer, not “businesses of all sizes”
- Proof: real numbers, named systems, screenshots of work you are allowed to show
- A single obvious next step — one primary action, repeated, not six competing buttons
- Contact details a human can use, not a contact form that silently fails
That last point is worth a sentence of its own. A contact form with no working backend is worse than no form: the visitor believes they have reached you, and nothing arrives.
Job 2 — Keep publishing, without a developer
A site with a 2023 news section says the business stopped. A site that publishes even once a month says the opposite, and it gives search engines and AI assistants fresh material to read.
Requirements, in order of importance:
| Requirement | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| A CMS your team can actually use | if publishing needs a developer, it will not happen |
| Categories that match how you think | industry notes / company news / case updates is enough |
| Visible publish and update dates | readers and machines both weigh recency |
| Structured data per article | this is what makes an article quotable |
| An RSS feed | cheap, and still used by aggregators and monitoring tools |
We do not recommend committing to a publishing schedule you cannot keep. One honest article a month beats a plan for twelve that stops in March.
Job 3 — Answer visitors when nobody is awake
Most enquiries arrive outside your working hours, and most of them are the same six questions. An assistant on the site handles both facts at once.
What makes one useful rather than annoying:
- It answers from your own content — services, process, pricing structure, availability — not from the open internet
- It says when it does not know, instead of inventing a price or a date
- It hands over to a human at the right moment: a request for an exact quote, a project brief, or a question it cannot answer
- It streams its answer so the visitor sees progress instead of a spinner
- It is rate-limited, so one visitor cannot run up your model bill
The handover is the part people underestimate. An assistant that cannot pass a serious enquiry to a person is a dead end. Ours passes it to WhatsApp with one tap, because that is where small teams actually reply from.
The checklist, in one place
Presentation
- One-sentence description of the business, in text
- Named target customer
- Proof: numbers, screenshots, or named systems you may show
- One primary call to action
- Working contact route, tested
Publishing
- CMS the team can use without a developer
- News section with categories
- Visible publish and update dates
- Per-article structured data
- RSS feed
Assistant
- Answers from your own content
- Admits uncertainty; never invents prices or dates
- Hands over to a human on request
- Streams responses
- Rate-limited
Foundations
- Fast on a mid-range phone over mobile data
-
llms.txtdescribing the entity and services -
robots.txtallowing the crawlers you want - Sitemap submitted to Google and Bing
- Analytics that answer “did anyone enquire”, not just “how many visits”
What we would cut
A checklist is only useful if it also says what to leave out. For a company of five to fifty people, we would not spend budget on: a custom design system, a multi-language build before there is demand, a logged-in customer portal, or a blog with twelve categories. Those are answers to problems you do not have yet.
If you want the checklist applied to your own site rather than read, that is what the 30-minute scoping call is for. Bring the URL and we will tell you which of the three jobs is currently failing.
