The situation
General Hardware & Supply is the kind of business a small town runs on. Hardware and tools, agricultural supply, paint, propane refills, animal feed, garden seed, hunting and fishing — plus a greenhouse. Twenty years of trading, ten thousand items in stock, and a reputation good enough to earn a 4.7 rating from more than sixty neighbours.
What it had online was a phone number and little else. Nothing about the ten thousand items, the departments or the greenhouse, nothing about when it opens — and a look that could have belonged to any business in any trade.
That costs more than it used to. When someone forty minutes away wants to know whether you carry a particular fitting, or what time you close on a Saturday, or whether you do propane — they do not call any more. They search. If what comes back does not answer them, they drive to the chain store in the next county instead, and you never learn that you lost the sale.
The honest version of the brief: make it so that someone who already wants what this shop sells can find out what is in it. Nothing more elaborate than that.
What we built
A custom site, built from scratch rather than dropped into a template, because a farm-and-hardware store does not have the same shape as a restaurant or a salon.
Before
- A phone number, and little else
- Nothing showing what the shop actually stocks
- A design that gave no clue it was a farm and hardware store
After
- A full site with every department laid out
- Hours, phone and directions on every page
- A dedicated greenhouse section
- A paint finder
- A monthly sale page the owner updates themselves
Departments, in the language the shop actually uses
Hardware and tools, agricultural supply, paint, propane, feed, garden, hunting and fishing. Each one written the way someone working land in Perry County would describe it, not the way a marketing template would. The brands people come in asking for — DeWalt, Milwaukee, Stanley — are named, because that is frequently the exact thing being searched for.
A paint finder
Paint is the classic small-hardware problem: an enormous range, and a customer who knows the effect they want rather than the product name. The finder narrows it down on the site so the conversation at the counter starts further along.
A monthly sale the owner controls
The store runs fresh in-store deals every month. Historically that flyer existed on paper and reached exactly the people already standing in the shop. Now it goes on the site — and critically, the owner puts it there, without calling us and without waiting. A sale that needs a developer to publish is a sale that quietly stops being published by March.
This is the part of the job that matters most and gets talked about least. A site nobody at the business can update is a brochure with an expiry date.
Why it was built this way
Three decisions worth naming, because they apply to most small local businesses and not just this one:
- Fast over fancy. Rural connections are not what they are in Nashville, and a good part of the traffic is someone standing in a field on one bar of signal. Weight was a design constraint, not an afterthought.
- The practical details at the top. Hours, phone number, where you are. The most common visit to a local business site is someone checking one fact. Making them hunt for it is the single easiest way to lose them.
- Owner-editable where it changes. Everything seasonal — the sale, the greenhouse — is editable in-house. Everything structural is not, so it cannot be broken by accident.
What this cost
This sits in the range of a business website rather than a one-page site, because of the departments and the owner-updatable sale. Our pricing is published rather than quoted on request — you can see the whole ladder on the pricing guide.
For a business that had gone twenty years without a website, the number that actually mattered was not the build cost. It was that a customer forty minutes out can now confirm, in ten seconds and at 9pm, that the drive is worth making.