Narrow or broad: what is my website supposed to do?

The wrong question: what should be on the site?

If you start from what should be on the site, you always end up with the same list. About us, services, gallery, contact, maybe news. That list is not a decision, it is a habit, and it is the reason so many Icelandic websites are identical.

The right question is what should happen. What should the person who found you have done before they close the tab? Once that action is written down the pages arrange themselves, because each one has to justify itself against it.

This is not a theoretical exercise. It is exactly the work that sets the price, because the price of a website is not a count of pages. It is a count of things that have to work.

The narrow site

A narrow site does one thing and does it properly. A guesthouse that wants direct bookings. A workshop that wants the phone to ring. A photographer who wants people to see the work and send an enquiry.

It is not thin, it is focused. Five to eight pages, one action repeated on each of them, and no alternative pulling attention away from it. It is also the cheapest and the fastest to deliver, because there is nothing in it that nobody uses.

If you are in doubt, this is almost always the right answer. Adding later is far easier than taking away, and a site that is too big from day one is rarely trimmed. It is simply left alone.

The broad site

A broad site is right when you genuinely run more than one business on the same domain, or when the same visitor needs different answers depending on who they are.

A hotel selling both rooms and a function room for groups. A producer selling both retail and wholesale. A company that needs Icelandic for customers and English for staff moving to the country. One route does not serve those, because it is the wrong route for half of everybody who arrives.

A broad site costs more to build and more every year, because there is more content that has to be kept true. That is fine when it pays its way. It is expensive when it was bought because having a lot of pages looked better.

The test that settles it in two minutes

Write down three sentences. First: what the person should do on the site. Second: how you would know whether they did it. Third: what the worst outcome is if they do not.

If you cannot answer the second sentence, the action is not sharp enough and the site will not return anything measurable whatever it cost. A booking can be counted. An order can be counted. A phone call can be counted. "More visibility" cannot be counted, which makes it a wish rather than a goal.

If you have two genuinely different answers to the first sentence and neither can give way, then you have a broad site, and that is simply a fact about your business. In that case pay for it and do it properly.

What you can leave out of the first round

A blog nobody will write for. An empty blog is worse than no blog, because a most-recent post from 2023 tells the visitor that nothing here is being kept up.

The third language. Two languages done well beat three done halfway, and a translation that reads badly does more damage than no translation.

A customer login can be useful when it solves a clear need. First define who will use it and what work it should save.

News, an events calendar, and anything else that needs somebody to update it every week. If that somebody does not exist, it is not a feature, it is a debt.

None of this is forbidden. It is an order. Start with what should happen, make the site do that well, and add the rest when there is genuinely somebody to look after it.

Sources and dates

• This article is based on experience, not measurement. It draws on phone calls with Icelandic companies over the last seven years and describes how I price and scope work, not the result of a study.
• The prices mentioned are my own and match the price list at /verd. If they change there, they change here.