Building a First Website for a Local Business: A Teen Business

What you actually do

You find a small business with no website. A barber, a food truck, a dog groomer, a cleaner. They are running everything through Instagram messages and a phone number, and half the people looking for them never find them at all.

You build them five pages. What they do, where they are, when they're open, what it costs, and how to reach them. That is the whole website, and it's more than most of them have.

AI can put those pages together quickly now, so the building is not the hard part any more. Gathering the true information is, and so is being the person who changes the opening hours in December when the owner texts you.

What it costs to start

The domain name and the hosting are the customer's, in the customer's name, paid by the customer. Roughly $20 to $60 a year between them, depending on what you pick.

Set it up that way even though it's slower. If the accounts are in your name and you get busy with exams, their business goes offline and it's your fault. Ask a parent to sit with you and the owner while those accounts are made, because somebody over 18 usually has to hold the payment method.

Your own outlay is time. Reckon on a weekend for the first one and a lot less after that.

Find your first customer this month

1. Walk your own high street and write down every business with no website. Search each name on your phone as you go. The ones where nothing useful comes up are your list.
2. Start with somebody your family already buys from. A parent introducing you to the owner they've known for ten years is worth more than any advert.
3. Build one before you're paid, for a business you know well, and show it. A real page beats any promise you could make on a doorstep.
4. Ask each customer for the name of one other owner. Small business owners all know each other, and that is how the second and third jobs arrive.

What to charge

Two parts, and the course covers why.

The build is one payment. Somewhere around $150 to $300 is a fair place for a young builder to start on a five page site. Ask an adult who runs a business locally what they'd expect to pay before you name a number.

Then there's the part people forget. Charge a small amount each month to keep it alive: hours changed, a new photo, a price updated, the domain renewed on time. Say $15 a month across six customers. That's $90 a month arriving whether or not you build anything new, and it's the difference between a summer job and a business.

Say so plainly when you sell it. "The site is $200. Keeping it right is $15 a month, and if you'd rather do that yourself I'll show you how."

Rules and staying safe

Show a parent this list.

• Meet business owners at their own shop, in opening hours, and take a parent to the first meeting.
• The domain and hosting accounts belong to the customer, in their name, with their payment details. Never yours.
• Never handle a customer's passwords, banking or card details. If a site needs to take payments, that's a job for an adult and not for this.
• Only publish photos you took or the owner gave you. Copying pictures or text from another business can be a real problem, so ask the owner where each photo came from and check with an adult if you are unsure.
• Put what you'll do in writing before you start, even three lines in a text message. Pages, price, and when it's finished.
• Get paid half at the start and half when it goes live, by e-transfer to a parent's account.

What Jacob would do

Jacob is 15 and lives in Toronto. He'd start with the barber his dad has gone to since before Jacob was born, and he would not talk about websites at all for the first ten minutes. He'd ask what people phone up to ask.

The answer would be opening hours and whether they take walk-ins. So that is what the top of the page would say, in big type, above everything else.

He'd take the photos himself on a Saturday morning rather than use anything found online. He'd write the words from what the barber actually said, not from what a chatbot guessed a barber would say. Then he'd put the phone number at the top and the bottom, because that's the thing everybody is looking for.

When it stops being fun

An owner who won't send you the photos. Another who wants nine changes the week after it goes live. A third who says the site did nothing for them, when what happened is that nobody knew it existed.

That last one is the real lesson. A website is not marketing on its own. Part of your job is telling the owner to put the address on their Instagram page, their receipts and their van, and if you skip that conversation you'll get blamed for it later.