◐Your first website

Not with the program, but with three sentences on a sheet of paper:

1. What do you do? In one sentence, the way you would explain it to a neighbour.
2. For whom? Private customers, businesses, clubs, a region.
3. What should someone who lands on your site do? Call, fill in a form, drop by, donate.

These three answers are the framework. Everything that comes after — wizard, blocks, design — is craft.

Once you have the three, start the wizard under “New website”. It asks its questions in turn and builds the site as it goes; on the right, a preview runs alongside and grows with every answer.

It asks one question per step and builds a complete website from the answers — pages, sections, sample texts, colour suggestions.

You do not have to. The plain form remains available, and anyone who knows what they want can also create pages individually. But: the wizard makes the decision for you about which pages are needed at all — and that is the decision most people get stuck on.

What it does not do for you: the texts about your business. It puts in suggestions so that the site does not look empty; you have to replace them.

The wizard can be run several times — for a second website or to start again from scratch.

Five. Fewer is not possible legally, and nobody needs more at the start:

• Home page — what you do, for whom, and how to reach you.
• Services or About us — whichever is more important.
• Contact — form, phone number, address, map if appropriate.
• Legal notice (Impressum) — mandatory under § 5 DDG (German Digital Services Act).
• Privacy notice — mandatory under Art. 13 GDPR.

Aurora Hive Sites generates the last two from your master data. You do not have to write them, but you should read them.

What can wait: blog, references, team, job vacancies, FAQ. All of these are good — but a site with five finished pages is better than one with twelve half-finished ones.

In this order, because that is how people read:

1. Hero — the one sentence saying what it is about, with an image and a button.
2. Services as a card grid — three to six, each in two lines.
3. Why you — customer testimonials, key figures or a short text about the business.
4. Call to action — what should happen now.
5. Contact — form, or at least phone number and address.

Optionally in between: an image gallery of your work, a list of events, recent posts.

What does not belong on the home page: the entire company history, all services in detail, the complete team. That is what subpages are for. The home page has to answer within thirty seconds whether someone is in the right place.

Replace them — all of them — before the site goes online. A sample text left standing on a real site is the most embarrassing mistake of this kind, and it happens surprisingly often.

Go through them page by page and work with a simple rule: could this sentence appear just as well on another business’s site? If so, it is not yours yet.

The sample texts are still useful: they show the length that fits in that place. If there are two lines, two lines are meant — not twelve.

Before publishing, it helps to look at the preview with fresh eyes, ideally the next day.

You can talk — that is enough. Take your phone and explain for five minutes what you do, just as you would on the phone. Then write that down. The result is better than anything you can force out of yourself at your desk.

Three steps that make any text better:

• Shorten. Delete the first sentence of every paragraph. Usually it was just a run-up.
• Informal or formal, but consistent. Everyone notices a switch.
• Concrete rather than general. “We work cleanly” — everyone claims that. “We cover everything, vacuum afterwards and take the covers away with us” — nobody claims that who does not do it.

And if you really cannot get any further: the AI suggestion in the editor provides a rough text that you rewrite. That is easier than sitting in front of an empty field.

That is the most common real obstacle, and it is worth solving rather than working around.

Sorted by impact:

1. Your own photos, even with a phone. A current phone photo of your workshop beats any bought stock image. It shows you, and that is exactly the point.
2. An afternoon with someone who can take photos. The cheapest investment in a website there is.
3. Royalty-free images from reputable sources — as a stopgap, not as a permanent solution.
4. No image at all. Better than an obvious stock photo of smiling people at a conference table.

For phone photos: hold it landscape, daylight, tidy up before you take the shot. Those are the three things that make up 90% of the result.

If you have a logo: the colours from the logo. If not: one of the suggested themes, without agonising over it.

Good to know:

• One main colour is enough. It is used for buttons and highlights; the rest stays neutral. Two strong colours side by side rarely look good and almost always look loud.
• Contrast beats taste. Light grey text on a white background looks elegant in the preview and is unreadable on a phone in the sun.
• The colour decides nothing. No order has ever been lost over a shade of blue. Texts and images decide.

It can be changed at any time and takes effect immediately across the whole website.

Yes. Without a logo, the name of the business appears at the top as lettering — neatly set and perfectly adequate to begin with.

A logo is worthwhile if you need one anyway: for vehicles, letterhead, workwear. Then the website becomes one of several uses, and the commission pays off. For the website alone it is rarely the best first expense.

If you have one: upload it as a PNG with a transparent background, at least 400 pixels wide. A logo copied out of a Word document usually brings a white box with it, which becomes visible on a coloured background.

With the wizard, the framework, design and sample texts are in place in about half an hour. What comes after that is the real work:

• Writing texts: two to four hours, spread out. That is the big item.
• Getting and uploading images: one to two hours, plus the time for taking photos.
• Checking legal texts and entering master data: half an hour.
• Reviewing, small details, checking on a phone: one hour.

So altogether one working day, spread over one to two weeks. Anyone who tries to do it in one go gets tired during the texts, and it shows in the result.

What drags things out is almost never the technology, but the question of what should be on the site.

Almost everything except the five mandatory pages. Specifically:

• Blog. A blog with two posts from a year ago does more harm than good. Only start once you know you can keep it up.
• Second language. Only once the first is complete.
• Newsletter. Needs content and regularity.
• A/B tests. Produce nothing with few visitors.
• Members’ area, donations, events. If you need them, you will know. If you are unsure, you do not need them yet.

What you should not put off: legal notice, privacy notice, a working contact form, the phone number in the header. Those are the four things on which a site fails.

On a phone. Not in a narrow browser window, but on a real device — you can send yourself the preview or open it directly.

What to look out for:

• Is the heading still readable? Long headings wrap onto four lines on a phone and push everything down.
• Can the buttons be hit? With a thumb, not with the tip of a mouse pointer.
• Are images cropped sensibly? A landscape image often shows the middle on a phone — if the essential part is at the edge, it is gone.
• Is the phone number clickable? On a phone, that is the most important button of all.

More than half of your visitors come from a phone. If you can only check one view, check this one.

When the five mandatory pages are in place, the texts are yours and the contact form has been checked. Not when everything is perfect — it never will be, and a site that is not online helps nobody.

What really has to be right beforehand:

• Legal notice complete, privacy notice present.
• No sample text left.
• Phone number and address correct — sounds obvious, and is the most common mistake.
• Contact form filled in once yourself, and the message arrived.
• Looked at once on a phone.

Everything else you can improve afterwards at your leisure. A website is not a book going to print.

Three things in the first few days, then rest:

1. Link to it everywhere. Email signature, vehicle, invoices, business card, business directories, your Google listing. A website nobody knows about has no visitors — and search engines find you faster when others link to you.
2. Maintain your Google Business Profile, if you work locally. For many businesses it brings more than the website itself.
3. Wait two weeks, then take another look. Whatever bothers you then will bother others too.

And after that: nothing. A website does not need to be changed every week. What it needs is for the details to be right — opening hours, phone number, services.

Little — provided you have not built it to depend on being up to date.

The mandatory part is two sessions a year, twenty minutes each:

• Are opening hours, phone number, contact people and prices correct?
• Are key figures and years still right?
• Does a form enquiry still arrive? (Fill one in yourself.)

Everything beyond that is optional. Anyone who blogs blogs regularly or not at all. Anyone who shows events has to maintain them — otherwise the site shows the summer party from the year before last.

The simplest precaution: only build in sections you trust yourself to maintain.

Yes. There are two ways, and they differ more than it seems:

• Rebuild everything — the pages are generated afresh, your texts are gone. Useful if you have muddled something up while trying things out and there is no real work in it yet.
• Create a second website and build it up alongside at your leisure. The old one stays until you switch over.

The second route is almost always the right one once you have invested more than an hour. The media library is kept in both cases — you do not have to upload images a second time.

Before any fresh start: copy any texts you want to keep somewhere else.

Yes, at any time, and without your content suffering. Theme and content are separate: the theme determines colours, fonts and spacing; the sections stay as they are.

What can change in the process:

• Line breaks. A different font is wider or narrower; a heading that fitted on one line before may not afterwards.
• How images look. Some themes show images larger or cropped differently.

After the change, go through all pages once, on a phone too. It takes five minutes and finds the two places where things are stuck.

Do not keep changing. A website that looks different every quarter comes across as restless.

Yes. Every website can be reached at a provisional address from the start — you can look at it, send it round and agree it with colleagues without anyone having got a domain.

Your own domain comes along once the site is in place. That is also the better order: a domain pointing to a half-finished site is already picked up by search engines — in its half-finished state.

What you can clarify in parallel, because it can take time:

• Who owns the address you want? If it is free, register it early, by all means.
• Who has access to the domain management, if you already have one? That is the question that holds up moves most often.

Yes, and it is particularly worthwhile in two places:

• Photos. Half a day with someone who can take photos changes a website more than any design decision.
• Texts. Do not have them written — have someone listen to you and write it down. Anyone who writes your texts without having talked to you writes generic texts.

What you should do yourself: click the site together. Not to save money, but so that later you can change an opening time without having to call anyone. That is exactly where websites built by service providers fail: not in the building, but in the upkeep.

If an agency looks after the website, there is a separate route for that — with a clear division of who may change what.

Six, in order of frequency:

1. Too much on the home page. Everything important at the top — then everything is at the top and nothing is important.
2. Written about yourself instead of about the customer. “We have been in business since 1987” is less interesting than “We come within 48 hours”.
3. Contact options hidden. The phone number belongs in the header, not just in the legal notice.
4. Sample texts left in place. See above.
5. Never looked at on a phone. Where most visitors come from.
6. Waited too long. A good site that arrives after eight months has achieved nothing for eight months.

All six can be fixed in half an hour once you know them.

The new site is built alongside the old one, under its provisional address. Only when it is finished is the domain switched over — there is no gap in between.

The procedure:

1. Build and check the new site; the old one stays online.
2. Note down the addresses of the old subpages. Whatever had been reachable at a particular address should be reachable there again afterwards.
3. Switch the domain over. From now on it points to the new site.
4. In the first few days, check whether forms arrive and whether you are still found in search.

Keep the old site for a few more weeks — as a reference for texts nobody remembered.

In the vast majority of cases, one site with a subpage per location.

Almost everything speaks for this: one lot of maintenance, one presence, one domain, and the location pages strengthen each other in search engines.

Separate websites are only worthwhile if the locations really are different businesses — different name, different customers, different services. Then they are two businesses that happen to have the same owner.

For the location pages: each one must have its own text. The same page five times with the place name swapped is treated by search engines as a duplicate and achieves nothing. Write for each location what is different there — team, opening hours, catchment area, directions.

On the contact page and in the footer — in both places, because people look in both.

What often goes wrong:

• Only “by appointment”. That is not an opening time, but a request to call. If that is how it is, put it more kindly: “Appointments by arrangement, available by phone Mon–Fri 8:00–17:00.”
• Public holidays and company holidays. That is what the announcement bar is for: enter the text, set the period, and it appears and disappears by itself.
• Contradictions with the Google listing. If different times are listed there, you annoy customers standing in front of a locked door. Maintain both together.

If you offer an emergency service, the number belongs at the top — not at the bottom of the page.

If you can state them: yes. The most common reason why someone leaves a site again is the unanswered question of what it costs.

Three forms, depending on the business:

• Fixed prices — for products and clearly defined services. The most effective.
• “From” prices or ranges — “Bathroom renovation from 8,000 €”. Removes uncertainty without tying you down.
• An example project with a price. If nothing at all can be given as a flat rate: describe a real, invoiced job, with its scope and amount.

What does not work: “prices on request” as the only information. Whoever reads that does not enquire — they keep looking.

Legally: towards consumers, final prices including VAT must be stated.

Not necessarily — but it costs nothing and lowers the threshold. Some people do not like to call; others get in touch at eleven at night, when nobody answers the phone.

If you use one, three rules apply:

• As few fields as possible. Name, message, how to reach them. Every additional required field costs enquiries.
• Fill it in once yourself and check whether it arrives — look in the spam folder too.
• Reply. A form whose enquiries are left lying is worse than none.

And always show the phone number as well. Anyone who needs something quickly does not want to write.

Yes — for a single but weighty reason: the website belongs to you; the profile does not.

A blocked, deleted or suddenly invisible profile is not an exceptional case. Anyone whose entire reachability is there loses it with a click that someone else makes.

On top of that:

• Being found. Anyone searching for “electrician Radebeul” searches on Google, not on Instagram.
• Legal notice obligation. Business profiles also need a legal notice (Impressum); most link to the website for this.
• Factual information. Nobody finds opening hours, services and directions among thirty posts.

One does not replace the other. Both together: the profile for visibility, the website as the point of contact.

As few people as possible, and at least two.

As few as possible, because every additional person increases the likelihood that two people edit the same page at the same time or that something gets published that had not been finished.

At least two, because one single person gets ill, resigns or goes on holiday. The situation “only the boss has the password” regularly ends with nothing being changed for six months.

Anyone who is only meant to correct a text now and then does not need full access — for that there is the editor directly on the site. It can change texts and nothing else.

This one. Once everything is ticked off, the site can go online:

Content - Home page answers in three sentences: what, for whom, how to reach you. - No sample text left anywhere on the website. - Phone number, address and opening hours are correct.

Legal - Legal notice (Impressum) complete (company name, address, authorised representative, contact, register and VAT ID if applicable). - Privacy notice present and matching what the site does. - For prices aimed at consumers: final prices. - Photos: your own or with usage rights; people shown have given their consent.

Technical - Contact form filled in once yourself, message arrived. - Looked at on a phone. - Every page reachable via the navigation.