Before and after: three small business websites, teardown style
Theory is cheap. Here are three real businesses, three real old websites, and the one thing each was failing to say, with the fix that changed it. Different categories, same disease, same cure: stop being generic, start being specific.
- McEvoy Electric, a licensed contractor in Nevada County. (The one that started all of this. The full story is here.)
What the old site failed to say: that this was a licensed, twenty-plus-year business. A dated contractor template made a decades-deep electrician look like any electrician anywhere. The license and the years, the facts that earn a homeowner's trust fastest, were nowhere a visitor looked first. The phone number, the entire point of a contractor's site, was a silent register.
The fix: license and twenty-plus years above the fold. Dedicated pages for each service, so a specific search lands somewhere specific. A call button visible from anywhere on the page. Built fast and static, clean enough for search engines to read.
The principle: lead with the credential that earns trust, and make the one action you want, the call, impossible to miss. For a trade business, a buried phone number is a closed register.
- Love Roots Yoga, a studio.
What the old site failed to say: the entire feeling of the place. A studio sells calm, clarity, and the sense that a nervous first-timer will be okay. The old site was a cluttered, generic wellness template that communicated none of it, and the practical thing a visitor needs most, what classes exist and when, was hard to find. A studio whose website feels chaotic is arguing against its own product.
The fix: a calm, modern site that finally looks like the feeling of the studio, with the schedule and an easy first-visit path made obvious and one tap away. Less clutter, more clarity, a warm answer to "I've never done this, where do I start?"
The principle: for an experience business, the website should feel like the experience. And the most important practical question, here, "what classes, when, and how do I start?", should never be more than a tap away.
- Fire Safe Council, a fire-safety nonprofit.
What the old site failed to say: it had genuinely valuable programs and resources, the exact things people come to a fire-safety org to find, buried under an aging structure on a site that didn't work on a phone. When someone in a fire-prone area lands on your site, they're usually after one specific resource. Making them dig for it is a real failure, not an aesthetic one.
The fix: surface the programs and resources to where people find them immediately, modernize the structure so the site is navigable, fix the mobile experience for the phone in someone's hand.
The principle: if people come to you for specific resources, your only job is to make them impossible to miss. Burying what people came for is the most expensive mistake a useful organization can make.
What all three share. None of these had a "make it prettier" problem. Each had a "you're hiding the thing that matters" problem. The electrician's license buried. The studio's calm absent. The resources two clicks too deep. A redesign that works isn't a new coat of paint. It's finding what's already true and valuable and putting it where a stranger sees it first. The whole job, in three different costumes.
Want your own teardown? Paste your URL into Pages and you'll get exactly this: what your site is failing to say, and the specific fix, in minutes.
every one of these sites was already "fine." Fine is the problem. Fine means generic, and generic means a visitor can't tell why you, specifically, are the right call.