Nobody reads your website. They check four things and leave.

It is nine at night and somebody is looking you up. She is on the couch with her phone, her mother’s paperwork is on the kitchen table, and she has your firm in one tab and two other firms in the next two. In about a minute she decides which one she calls in the morning.

She needs four things in that minute, and she will not hunt for any of them: what you do and where you are, a page she can read in one hand, a way to reach you when your office is dark, and none of it slow. Everything else is decoration, and decoration is fine once those four are done.

The first screenful, before anybody scrolls

Most of the sites we are asked to look at open with a photograph of a handshake and a line about a commitment to excellence. A stranger cannot tell from that whether you write wills or defend speeding tickets, or whether you are on Market Street or forty minutes down the road.

She would have to scroll to find out, and half the time she doesn’t. Put the plain words at the top instead — the ones she typed into her phone ten minutes earlier. Estate planning and probate in downtown Frederick. Bookkeeping and payroll for contractors across the county.

The awards, the history, the photograph of the building in 1974 — keep all of it. It belongs further down the page, where somebody who has already decided she likes you goes looking for a reason to be sure.

What people look up at nine at night

Nobody is reading your service pages at that hour. They are checking whether you open on Saturday, how long it takes to get there from Urbana, whether they will spend twenty minutes circling downtown for a space, and whether they can put something in the calendar without talking to anybody yet.

• Your hours, including the Saturday you do open and the week in August you do not.
• The address written out so somebody can read it to a driver, and one line about where to park.
• A phone number a thumb can press, on every page rather than only on the contact page.
• One way to leave a question at nine at night, and a plain sentence about when somebody will answer it.
• The name of the person who picks up, because calling a person is easier than calling a firm.

Try all of that standing on a sidewalk in July rather than sitting at your desk. A number her thumb cannot press is not really a number, a list of what you do that runs off the right-hand edge is not really a list, and grey type at that size does not survive the sun.

Then there is speed, and the reason is nearly always the same one. Somebody loaded the photographs straight off a camera, four thousand pixels across, and every visitor on a phone downloads all of them before anything appears. Making them smaller is a morning’s work and the cheapest thing on this page.

The one part that can genuinely go wrong

Everything so far costs you calls. One thing on a small firm’s site can cost you more than that, and it is the contact form with a paperclip on it. Somebody attaches last year’s return, or a photograph of a driver’s license, and that document goes wherever somebody once set the form to send it.

Ask whoever built the site three questions, in writing: where an attachment lands, who at that end can open it, and how long it stays. Tax preparers work under the Federal Trade Commission’s Safeguards Rule, and the written information security program it asks for is meant to cover that form too.

If nobody can answer those three questions, take the paperclip off. A name, a number and one line about the matter is enough to get somebody on the phone, and the documents can arrive the way they already arrive.

Most of the sites we are shown do not need rebuilding. They need the top of the page rewritten, the hours put where people look, the photographs made smaller and the paperclip taken off. We do design and build these, but a review comes first: ninety minutes on site, and the written report is yours either way.