The short answer
Start with your services, real coverage area, useful job photos, a monitored inbox, and one clear customer action. You do not need an existing website to ask for a plan. Agree on pages, account ownership, costs, and delivery tests before paying for a build.
Start with the job you want more of
A new website is easier to plan when you can finish this sentence: “I want more people in this area to ask me about this service.” A plumber wanting repair requests needs a different first screen from a landscaper selling larger garden projects. List the work you want, the work you do not take, and the places you actually serve. This is more useful than choosing an animation first.
Write down five questions customers ask before hiring you. Use their words. Questions about minimum job sizes, estimates, coverage, preparation, and availability often reveal what the website needs to explain. If you do not have customers yet, label these as assumptions and revise them after real inquiries.
Make a small content folder
Collect your public business name, reply email, business phone if you use one, working hours, services, and a plain description of your process. Add photos you own and have permission to publish. A useful photo shows the work, the team, or a detail a buyer can understand; it does not have to look like a national advertising campaign.
Keep customer addresses and private details out of public photos unless you have permission. Share credentials only when current and verifiable. If you are a new business with no reviews, explain your process and show honest work samples. Never turn a sample into a customer success story.
Choose pages by customer decisions
A focused five-page starting plan might be Home, Main Service, Second Service, About and Service Area, and Contact. Another business may need one service page and a gallery instead. Choose the structure based on the jobs you sell; five pages is a scope limit, not a reason to create empty pages.
- Home: what you do, where you work, why you are a fit, and how to ask.
- Service pages: the problem, what the service includes, useful examples, and the next step.
- About and coverage: who is responsible for the work and the real area served.
- Contact: a short request, a monitored destination, and an honest response expectation.
Keep the domain and accounts in your name
You can request a website plan before buying a domain. Agree on the business name first, then choose and register the domain in an account you control. Keep the registrar, hosting, business email, and payment records accessible to you. Give a designer delegated access where supported; do not paste passwords into an inquiry form.
Ask what happens if you stop working together. You should know who owns the approved source and content, how account access is removed, and how the website can be restored after a problem. A written handoff is part of the work, not an extra after launch.
Separate the build price from running costs
Compare written scopes rather than headline prices alone. Check page count, copy responsibilities, revision rounds, image sourcing, form setup, launch work, and exclusions. Domain registration, hosting, email, and paid software can be separate ongoing costs. Ask for those costs before committing.
Fieldline’s $1,500 new-website pilot covers up to five focused pages for the first two approved clients. Optional care for a Fieldline build is $49 per month. Read the scope and exclusions; ecommerce and custom portals are outside this pilot.
Test a customer request before launch
Open the preview on your own phone. Read the service page, send a clearly labeled test request, and find the matching message in the correct inbox. Then try a missing required field and an invalid email. A successful message on a screen does not by itself prove the request arrived.
Check that navigation works, text is readable, and buttons lead where they say. Ask the designer to check page titles, descriptions, canonical URLs, sitemap, and indexation settings. These make the site easier to understand and maintain; they do not guarantee search positions.
Choose a first version you can learn from
Your first site should be complete enough to use, with real information and working requests. It does not need a page for every possible neighborhood. Track the questions and objections real people send, then use those to decide the next improvement. A useful next page answers a recurring customer need.
You can send Fieldline a first-website request without a current URL. Tell Dylan your business, service area, and what you want customers to do. The next step comes by email, with no sales call.
Written by Dylan Saatdjian, who runs Fieldline Web Co. and does the work these guides describe. No affiliate links, no sponsored placements. Prices and ranges reflect publicly listed figures at the time of writing; always confirm current pricing with any provider directly.